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Message: [QUOTE="Ubercroz, post: 2343950, member: 56929"] I was just reading the interview with Phil Galfond and saw the discussion below it about How you can improve and nature v. nurture and intelligence v. hard work, etc. It made me think of the Malcolm Gladwell book "Outliers." Really a lot of the conversation in that book deals with precisely this. What I found most interesting is that essentially you do need both of these things. There were several interesting examples, but one was in regards to the Nobel Prize in physics. People who get that prize are smart. You have to be intensely smart to get that prize, to be smart enough to earn it. You also have to work hard and put in the hours. I think everyone can recognize that. However, once you were "smart enough" it didn't matter how smart you were. It was more a matter of threshold than an absolute. Someone with a 170 IQ was no more likely to win a nobel prize (based off of results) than someone with a 135 IQ. However, once you fall below that threshold you will almost certainly never win won. Another example was in an advanced musical school. All of the people who got into the school were very talented. But some of them were going to be soloists, some were going to be 1st chair in a large symphony, others were going to be music teachers who never really got to play at the highest level. The thing that separated these individuals was work. When they added up the total time THROUGHOUT THEIR ENTIRE LIFE that they had practiced, it worked out that people who practiced more got the better jobs. There was not even one example of a "phenom" who got their in less time. There was no example of a grinder who worked harder than everyone else in his group by a substantial margin and worked his way in. Even in chess this is true. Bobby Fischer (a "phenom" player) played 10,000 of chess before he was rated a grandmaster - but he did it in 9 years, rather than the 10 it took most other grandmaster chess players. This, I believe, holds true in poker as well. You must have a certain natural talent. You have to be smart enough and talented enough to play at the highest levels. If you don't have that natural talent, then no amount of work is going to get you there. You simply do not have the tools to make it. However, if you have those tools then the only thing holding you back is work. I imagine that at each level there is a skill threshold. It's, unfortunately, like the Peter Principle. The Peter Principle states you will continue to improve and get promoted in an organization as long as you succeed, and will no longer get promoted once you stop. Therefore, the people in positions of authority who are good at what they do will eventually spend most of their working life at a level they cannot succeed at. This holds true in poker. If you beat 10nl then you go to 25nl. If you beat 25nl you go to 50nl. 50nl to 100nl, 100nl to 200nl, until you start losing. And most players will bump their head against that losing level that they do not have the capacity to beat and will keep taking shots and losing. While hard work matters a great deal, if you do not have the fundamental skills and abilities to succeed then you will not be able to work your way into that higher level of play. But if you have those skill sets, then hard work will get you the rest of the way. For me, I choose to play at the level I play at because I recognized that I have probably capped out my skill level. I don't have the capacity for nosebleed play. I can actually bear higher levels than I do play, but I choose not to because of the work it takes and because I have a better winrate with lower risk at the level I am at. Just some thoughts I had. [/QUOTE]

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