Can hard work beat intelligence? originally appeared on Quora – the place to gain and share knowledge, empowering people to learn from others and better understand the world.
Answer by Auren Hoffman, SafeGraph CEO. fmr LiveRamp CEO. Started & sold 5 companies, on Quora:
Intellect is clearly a muscle. While some are born with better genes and better tools … it is something you need to work on and grow.
If you work hard after college, you’ll probably grow at a rate of 10% year-over-year. That means seven years after graduating, you’ll roughly be twice as good as when you graduated. And that’s if you continue to work hard after college.
If you don’t work at all on growing your intellect, you will actually atrophy. There are actually people who are less interesting 7 years after college than they were while they were in college. They went backward. Because they stopped working hard on developing their intellect. They stopped reading interesting things. They stopped having interesting conversations. They stopped being really intellectually curious. They stopped putting themselves in a position where they could be wrong.
Think of the person you know that went to an amazing university 20 years ago but now has nothing interesting to say. Before they went to Harvard, they probably worked really hard at being intelligent. They worked on their skills. They pursued activities that would help them gain intellect. Of course, those might not have been the right long-term skills, but the person worked hard nevertheless.
But at some point after university, this particular person starting slouching. They stopped growing. And stopped working hard to gain in their intellect.
So if you work hard, you can grow 10% year-over-year. 10% yearly growth is awesome if you are 50 years old, but you should be able to do way better if you are 20. You should be able to design a program where you can grow 25-30% year-over-year when you are in your twenties. And that is really hard work.
Of course, your rate of growth should slow as you age (because your absolute value has grown). So the most important thing is that your absolute growth grows every year … if it shrinks you are starting to be in danger of some competitor overtaking you.
How do I measure growth?
Well, you can’t exactly. You cannot measure your growth exactly … but you intuitively know when you are not growing as fast as you could be. And you shouldn’t settle for low growth as it is hard to get time back and you owe it to yourself to reach your full potential.
Summation: if you outwork people who are smarter than you in the right way (by focusing on your personal growth), you will eventually be smarter than them.
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