# Talent  ## Metadata - Author: [[Tyler Cowen and Daniel Gross]] - Full Title: Talent - Category: #books ## Highlights - Daniel stressed the importance of hobbyists and “weirdos,” noting that many major mainstream internet revolutions started with products that appeared to be niche. It is the people who work intently on pleasing a narrow fan base, but pleasing them intensely, who end up with the skills and networks to market the product to broader audiences. So very often, if you are looking for a start-up that will hit it big, do something counterintuitive by seeking out people aiming, at least at first, to please smaller and weirder audiences. ([Location 42](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08R2KNYVX&location=42)) - Tags: [[blue]] - “What is it you do to practice that is analogous to how a pianist practices scales?” You learn what the person is doing to achieve ongoing improvement, and perhaps you can judge its efficacy or even learn something from it. ([Location 46](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08R2KNYVX&location=46)) - Tags: [[blue]] - If the person does engage in daily, intensive self-improvement, perhaps eschewing more typical and more social pursuits, there is a greater chance they are the kind of creative obsessive who can make a big difference. ([Location 50](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08R2KNYVX&location=50)) - Tags: [[blue]] - “Tyler is contrarian in method. His superfast reading speed, various professional roles, constant podcasting and networking, obsessive learning, perpetual travel, and sheer stamina enable him to take in many more and different inputs, which allows him to have many more and different outputs. But it’s what’s in between where he shines. He sees the world as an economist, philosopher, psychologist, sociologist, anthropologist, liberal and conservative, globalist and nationalist, foreigner and native, art critic and artist, employer/administrator and employee, grant provider and grant recipient, interviewer and interviewee, teacher and student. There is almost no one who views the world like Tyler because almost no one has a comparable number or variety of inputs or mental models. Even if his conclusions were conventional, his reasoning and perspectives wouldn’t be.”2 ([Location 74](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08R2KNYVX&location=74)) - Tags: [[blue]] - We focus on a very specific kind of talent in this book—namely, talent with a creative spark—and that is where the bureaucratic approach is most deadly. In referring to the creative spark, we mean people who generate new ideas, start new institutions, develop new methods for executing on known products, lead intellectual or charitable movements, or inspire others by their very presence, leadership, and charisma, regardless of the context. Those are all people who have the gift of improving the world by reimagining the future as a different and better place. ([Location 146](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08R2KNYVX&location=146)) - Tags: [[blue]] - the venture capital or “Silicon Valley” approach to talent search worries much more about “sins of omission” than “sins of commission.” That is, if you’re a venture capitalist and miss one of the year’s big founders, you are out a lot of money and possibly out of your job as well. ([Location 203](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08R2KNYVX&location=203)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Everyone talks about being impressed by a candidate. But in venture, one odd emotion Daniel focuses on is fear—specifically those moments when a founder launches their pitch and Daniel begins to feel a subtle fear, brought on by the person’s brazen ambition and drive, that they will do anything to succeed. It’s not that the founder is trying to scare him; rather, they ooze ambition, and Daniel picks up on that. If Daniel feels subtly afraid of them, he will pay attention. ([Location 212](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08R2KNYVX&location=212)) - Tags: [[blue]] - These days, our very favorite interview question is this one: “What are the open tabs on your browser right now?” ([Location 324](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08R2KNYVX&location=324)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Especially for higher-level jobs, the question of spare time is a critical one. The very best performers don’t stop practicing for very long, and if you hear or sense that a person doesn’t do much practicing and skill refining in his or her spare time, they probably are poorly suited to assume a top position or to meet very high expectations. ([Location 328](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08R2KNYVX&location=328)) - Tags: [[blue]] - We both find during interviews that “downtime-revealed preferences” are more interesting than “stories about your prior jobs.” So for instance, “What subreddits or blogs do you read?” usually is better than “What did you do at your previous job?” ([Location 338](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08R2KNYVX&location=338)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Think of practice habits as one path toward continuously compounding learning and performance. Try to learn the practice habits of the person you are interviewing, as it will reveal one aspect of their approach to work. You also should try to learn just how self-conscious a person is about what he or she is doing for self-improvement. And if they give you a fumbling or bumbling account of their practice habits, as we have heard numerous times, you can help them out very easily by suggesting they think about practice a little more systematically. ([Location 346](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08R2KNYVX&location=346)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Daniel believes that if you wish to fund an applicant for venture capital, it is worth asking about the business plan to see how well the basic idea is presented and defended. If they can’t make a case for it to you, they’ll probably have trouble attracting talent to help them. The anti-interview crowd, many of whom are centered in academia, overlooks these obvious truths. ([Location 407](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08R2KNYVX&location=407)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Here are some questions that not only will elicit stories but also might yield relatively interesting answers: “How did you spend your morning today?” “What’s the farthest you’ve ever been from another human?” “What’s something weird or unusual you did early on in life?” “What’s a story one of your references might tell me when I call them?” “If I was the perfect Netflix, what type of movies would I recommend for you and why?” “How do you feel you are different from the people at your current company?” “What views do you hold religiously, almost irrationally?” “How did you prepare for this interview?” “What subreddits, blogs, or online communities do you enjoy?” “What is something esoteric you do?” ([Location 467](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08R2KNYVX&location=467)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Most of us have a bias toward well-spoken and articulate storytellers. But make sure you keep an awareness of this at the front of your mind, for it can cause you to hire glib but unsubstantial people and overlook rare creative talent. Do not overestimate the importance of the person’s articulateness. Focus instead on the substance and quality of the answers to your questions. Many very qualified candidates are not that quick on their feet, nor do they speak off the cuff in well-formulated, smooth-sounding sentences, but if they have good content, notice it. ([Location 502](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08R2KNYVX&location=502)) - Tags: [[blue]] - In order to obtain the best sense of a candidate, it is important not only what you ask but also how you ask it. End at least some of your questions on a note of surprise. Do not be afraid to let a question hang in the air after you ask it; hold the tension as a way of making it clear that you expect an answer, and a direct answer at that. ([Location 527](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08R2KNYVX&location=527)) - Tags: [[blue]] - The first time each of us met Peter Thiel, for instance, we noticed how engrossed he was in his explanations and, furthermore, how quickly and effectively he pulled people into his worldview, introducing and applying concepts such as “technological stagnation,” “the inability to imagine a future very different from the present,” “Georgist economics,” and “the Girardian sacrificial victim.” Maybe you don’t know what all of those concepts refer to, and maybe Peter’s audience doesn’t always either, but that is not the point. There is a logic to his argument, and Peter communicates that logic with the utmost conviction; the audience correctly senses a coherent underlying worldview, involving themes of lost dynamism, pessimism, and the all too human desire to copy other people and their habits. When Peter, in a public dialogue with Tyler, referred to the “Straussian interpretation of Christ,” everyone basically went along with it and kept on listening with extreme attentiveness, even though probably few of them understood the reference. ([Location 541](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08R2KNYVX&location=541)) - Tags: [[blue]] - As an aside, this point about language is one reason knowledge of the humanities, reading fiction, and being bilingual or trilingual can help you locate creative talent. If you are going to recognize what new personal languages look like, it helps to have been exposed to them in the past. It helps to know the sound of Shakespeare, whose language is like no one else’s, of his time or any other. It helps to be fluent in French, Spanish, Hindi, Chinese, or whatever other language you may have learned. And don’t neglect popular culture; shows such as Seinfeld, The Simpsons, Game of Thrones, and Rick and Morty have rhythms and languages all their own, just like the high-culture masterworks from the past. Tyler is a big advocate of learning as many different such “languages” as you can, not only to boost your understanding of the world, but also so you can recognize and better evaluate the languages and cultural codes of other people. ([Location 556](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08R2KNYVX&location=556)) - Tags: [[blue]] - A good rule of thumb is this: if you found your question in a job interview book or on a website, it is likely you are simply testing the candidate’s preparation level. Again, that is fine up to a point, but don’t confuse it with additional insight. ([Location 587](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08R2KNYVX&location=587)) - Tags: [[blue]] - “What are ten words your spouse or partner or friend would use to describe you?” “What’s the most courageous thing you’ve done?” “If you joined us and then in three to six months you were no longer here, why would that be?” Or ask the same question about five years down the line as well and see how the two answers differ. “What did you like to do as a child?” This gets at what they really like to do, because it harks back to a time before the world started bossing them around.7 “Did you feel appreciated at your last job? What was the biggest way in which you did not feel appreciated?” ([Location 590](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08R2KNYVX&location=590)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Rather than trying to go small with your questions (e.g., “How many ping-pong balls fit into a Volkswagen?”), it is often more useful to look for the larger picture. For instance, how well do your applicants understand themselves and their place in the world? Toward that end, how about these questions? “Which of your beliefs are you least rational about?” “What views do you hold almost irrationally?” ([Location 729](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08R2KNYVX&location=729)) - Tags: [[blue]] - is another useful question used by Peter Thiel: “How successful do you want to be?” Or this variant favored by Tyler: “How ambitious are you?” ([Location 757](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08R2KNYVX&location=757)) - Tags: [[blue]] - The degree of a person’s ambition is pretty valuable to know, and it gives you a clear sense of their potential upside. It also offers you a sense of a person’s self-knowledge and of how they present and defend that self-knowledge when they are in an unexpected situation. We have found that hardly anyone is expecting this question. It is somehow too direct, too probing, and it touches too deeply upon a person’s inner thoughts. Most people are used to settings where the default is to fake some mix of ambition, lack of ambition, or both, and where everyone else goes along with the faux presentation. ([Location 773](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08R2KNYVX&location=773)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Is this person so good that you would happily work for them? Can this person get you where you need to be way faster than any reasonable person could? When this person disagrees with you, do you think it will be as likely you are wrong as they are wrong? ([Location 820](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08R2KNYVX&location=820)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Another notable feature of online interaction is that it drains away many of the traditional markers of status. ([Location 911](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08R2KNYVX&location=911)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Typically the online medium raises the influence and stature of people who can get to the point quickly. You should aim to do that anyway, but online that is all the more imperative. ([Location 925](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08R2KNYVX&location=925)) - Tags: [[blue]] - we’ve found that in the recent COVID-19 migration to the internet savannah, status symbols have changed from designer jackets to digital bitrate. High-powered investors and CEOs are spending thousands on studio-style cameras and lighting. Daniel has found that many of his Pioneers, on the other hand, are mimicking this style of status marking using clever software. Using green screens, voice-modifying software, and video filters, they are changing their appearance to make themselves look the part of an impressive founder, and doing it on a budget. ([Location 959](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08R2KNYVX&location=959)) - Tags: [[blue]] - The relationship between IQ and the probability of becoming an inventor can be expressed in a number of different ways. For instance, being in either the 91st–95th percentile of measured IQ or the 96th–100th percentile increases the probability of being an inventor by about 2–3 percentage points. Alternatively, if we hold other factors constant, having all individuals in the highest IQ decile would, statistically speaking, involve a 183 percent rise in the number of inventors compared to the status quo. ([Location 1182](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08R2KNYVX&location=1182)) - Tags: [[blue]] - super-talented individuals, near the top of the achievement distribution, are in some fundamental ways like inventors. These individuals arrive at the top of their craft because they have pioneered new ways of doing things, whether it is Picasso and Braque creating cubism, Henry Ford realizing he should pay his workers $5 a day, or Sergey Brin and Larry Page realizing that the search problem could be cracked by sufficiently clever mathematics. These individuals need to see around corners that others cannot, and that’s our best guess for where smarts will continue to be important. ([Location 1207](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08R2KNYVX&location=1207)) - Tags: [[blue]] - One carefully done study considers the connection between IQ and lifetime wages at the very top of the IQ distribution, in this case in the top 0.5 percent. The data come from children initially chosen based on a survey in California schools in 1921–22, 856 men and 672 women, and the study traces how much those individuals earned over their lifetimes. In this study, one additional point of IQ correlates with earnings of about 5 percent higher, or in this data set about $184,100 more over the course of a lifetime. In other words, even within the category of people with very good test scores, being “smarter yet” correlates with a noticeable boost in pay. And here is the critical point: among this high-IQ group, that is a steeper pay/IQ gradient than we find for the population as a whole. That steeper gradient at the top is consistent with our view that intelligence probably matters most for the very high achievers.3 ([Location 1211](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08R2KNYVX&location=1211)) - Tags: [[blue]] - the relationship between cognitive ability and wages is convex, meaning that the higher we go in the wage distribution, the more potently cognitive ability predicts earnings. In other words, once again, the top of the distribution is where smarts really matter for performance.4 ([Location 1226](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08R2KNYVX&location=1226)) - Tags: [[blue]] - many top talents are well described by what is called the multiplicative model of success. In the multiplicative model, final success requires a fairly tight combination of several traits—variables expressing the strength of particular traits are in some manner multiplied together to achieve a powerful final effect. For instance, to be a top-tier classical music composer, you might need great work habits, musical genius, ability to play the piano, skill in orchestrating, persistence, and to have come from a major musical center in or near central Europe. If all of those traits come together, the result may be magic, as was the case with Mozart or Beethoven. But if you are missing just one of those traits, perhaps you fail altogether. Musical genius without great work habits, for instance, might mean you become a brilliant local improviser who never puts pen to paper to compose a major symphony. ([Location 1230](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08R2KNYVX&location=1230)) - Tags: [[blue]] - The value of pursuing intelligence also is relatively high when you are the first one on the scene and there is no general competition to hire that same talent. That means intelligence is a better indicator of promise for the very young, for individuals from remote or economically underexplored areas, and for individuals being brought into networks for the very first time. In contrast, intelligence is a worse indicator of hire quality if you are considering a sixty-year-old individual with an established track record. ([Location 1255](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08R2KNYVX&location=1255)) - Tags: [[blue]] - If a young Gustav Mahler sat down in front of you and hummed one of his melodies, you probably wouldn’t have the talent required to see his potential to become one of the greatest Romantic composers of all time. In other words, the super-talented are best at spotting other super-talented individuals, and there aren’t many of those super-talented talent spotters to go around. So if you are yourself a super-talented spotter of super-talented talent, you will find many instances of undervalued intelligence, undervalued positive work habits, undervalued drive, and so on. ([Location 1272](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08R2KNYVX&location=1272)) - Tags: [[blue]] - When the multiplicative model holds for potential top performers, the notion of underexplored talent is especially relevant. Usually it is much harder to spot the whole package than to look for a person who is smart, or who plays the guitar well, or who has a 98-mph fastball. Those particular traits are relatively easy to spot or measure. Yet seeing the whole package requires a much deeper synthetic ability, a good deal of luck, and what we are calling entrepreneurial alertness—that is, the ability to spot and perceive talents that others do not see. ([Location 1290](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08R2KNYVX&location=1290)) - Tags: [[blue]] - If you are hiring one person into a relatively mature institution, intelligence and other features of talent will matter much less, while ability to fit in will matter more. If you are creating a start-up, or otherwise building an institution from scratch, and hiring a whole team, various markers of talent—including intelligence and cooperativeness—will matter much more. Hiring a whole batch of very smart people has the potential to create strongly positive, dynamic, nonlinear benefits. ([Location 1325](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08R2KNYVX&location=1325)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Marc realizes that, in general terms, smarts are overrated. In 2007 he wrote an essay called “How to Hire the Best People You’ve Ever Worked With.”10 He argued that intelligence is overrated in making hires. Intelligence is context-dependent, and it matters most when a company already is favorably situated with respect to the market, Microsoft and Google being two examples of that phenomenon. No company has succeeded simply by putting out its shingle for intelligent individuals or by asking hires to solve difficult logic puzzles. While intelligence is, of course, a good thing, Marc argues that, all other factors equal, the more important qualities in a hire are drive, self-motivation, curiosity, and ethics. He also suggests that drive and curiosity coincide to a pretty high degree, especially in an era when the internet allows you, in your spare time, to keep up on your field for free. ([Location 1341](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08R2KNYVX&location=1341)) - Tags: [[blue]] - there is one study of Swedish CEOs, based on very good data, that does exactly this. The main results are that the median or “most typical” small-company CEO is above 66 percent of the Swedish population in cognitive ability, and the median large-company CEO is above 83 percent of the Swedish population in cognitive ability. In both cases those individuals are smarter than average, but they are not in the top 5 percent, much less the top 1 percent. So at least when it comes to CEOs, even very high achievers, at least as measured by their intelligence scores, are not as smart as you might think. ([Location 1369](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08R2KNYVX&location=1369)) - Tags: [[blue]] - We’re not saying we should elect presidents with no consideration of their intelligence levels. Rather, we’re pointing out that once we restrict our attention to people who have any chance at all of winning the presidency, other factors besides intelligence are very often more important. ([Location 1422](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08R2KNYVX&location=1422)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Five Factor theory aims to boil down human personalities to their simplest and most intuitively understandable explanatory components. The dominant form of this theory, which is sometimes used to categorize potential hires, presents five major categories for understanding personality: neuroticism, extraversion, openness, agreeableness, and conscientiousness. ([Location 1459](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08R2KNYVX&location=1459)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Commonly, the very top venture capitalists, when seeking a hitherto undiscovered founder, will look for high disagreeableness and also high openness. The disagreeableness will motivate the individual to charge full steam ahead with a new idea, even when others are not convinced. The openness will make that person more of an innovator and more willing to accept feedback when needed. ([Location 1474](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08R2KNYVX&location=1474)) - Tags: [[blue]] - You may need to end up with a judgment as to whether a particular set of qualities is desirable for a particular job, but you will handicap yourself intellectually if you start with a preordained take on whether these personality qualities are good or bad. ([Location 1484](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08R2KNYVX&location=1484)) - Tags: [[blue]] - just about everyone knows they ought to be trying to fake conscientiousness, so that is one reason to be wary of your interview impressions. Unless you devote serious time to interviewing references, often you don’t have a good sense of conscientiousness in advance; it’s something you learn about after the hire is made. For this reason, we view “looking for conscientiousness” as overrated in the hiring process, even when conscientiousness is important for the job. Or when conscientiousness truly does matter, make sure you interview the person’s references as well, ([Location 1545](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08R2KNYVX&location=1545)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Perhaps the most underrated challenge of being a founder comes from having “hung their name on the door.” Unlike an employee, the founder often derives their sense of personal self-worth from the success of their venture. Failures and setbacks hit particularly hard when there’s nobody else to blame. Great founders productively gain knowledge and momentum from their experiences, even the failures, and that requires a great degree of energy, curiosity, and power. Those are some pretty complex personality characteristics—they are not always easy to spot, and they can be very hard to find in the first place. ([Location 1564](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08R2KNYVX&location=1564)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Some of these characteristics seem to be easier to change than others; for example, I have noticed that people can become much tougher and more ambitious rapidly, but people tend to be either slow movers or fast movers and that seems harder to change. Being a fast mover is a big thing; a somewhat trivial example is that I have almost never made money investing in founders who do not respond quickly to important emails. ([Location 1574](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08R2KNYVX&location=1574)) - Tags: [[blue]] - One prominent result in this data set was that conscientiousness really mattered for earnings. The men who measured as one standard deviation higher on conscientiousness on average earned $567,000 more over their careers, which measures as 16.7 percent higher average lifetime earnings (though again, we cannot be sure this is a causal relationship). Extraversion also is correlated with higher earnings. Those men who were higher in extraversion by one standard deviation earned, over their careers, $491,100 more. Furthermore, the earnings premium from extraversion was the highest for the most highly educated of the men. As for agreeableness, it turns out that the more agreeable men in this data pool earned significantly less. Being one standard deviation higher on agreeableness is correlated with a reduction in lifetime earnings of about 8 percent, or $267,600. While that result is confirmed only for high-IQ individuals in California for a particular span of the twentieth century, it is broadly consistent with the results of other studies, some of which have been cited here already. These people might just not be aggressive enough in pushing their own case forward, instead preferring to go with the flow. ([Location 1596](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08R2KNYVX&location=1596)) - Tags: [[blue]] - The study looked at 1,139 venture capital pitches from 2010 to 2019, using machine-learning techniques to categorize the styles of the pitches. The main result was that venture capitalists like to hear very positive, optimistic pitches, but the people making those pitches underperform when it comes to actual results. So don’t be too swayed by agreeableness, because very often it doesn’t deliver on its promises. The disagreeable founders, who will tell you that you have it all wrong and that the world is badly screwed up and on the wrong track, may end up doing better. ([Location 1606](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08R2KNYVX&location=1606)) - Tags: [[blue]] - These data show another interesting feature: when personality matters (in terms of correlates) and when it does not. Personality traits correlate more strongly with income beginning when workers are in their early thirties, and the correlations peak in strength between the ages of forty and sixty, after which the correlations dwindle considerably. We are not sure how to interpret those results, but one speculation is that it takes a while for your most distinctive personality traits to fully blossom (or fester?), and also that there is an eventual evening-out of personality with extreme maturity. ([Location 1611](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08R2KNYVX&location=1611)) - Tags: [[blue]] - As for what predicts success in science, as measured by publications and citations (and distinct from earnings), scientists as a whole are conscientious, achievement-oriented, emotionally stable, and low in neuroticism compared to the general population. None of that comes as a huge surprise. Interestingly, eminent scientists are more likely to be dominant, arrogant, hostile, and self-confident compared to scientists as a whole. They are also more flexible in thought and behavior than scientists of lesser laurels. That is consistent with our more general view (presented in more detail shortly) that conscientiousness may be more important for tasks of lesser import and less important for leadership positions.17 ([Location 1646](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08R2KNYVX&location=1646)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Sometimes the leaders are the ones who need to decide when the rules can be broken, or at least bent. Consistent with that view, meta-studies suggest that conscientiousness is less important as a predictor of job success for more complex tasks and for higher-level positions. ([Location 1739](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08R2KNYVX&location=1739)) - Tags: [[blue]] - On stamina, economist Robin Hanson wrote: “It wasn’t until my mid-30s that I finally got to see some very successful people up close for long enough to notice a strong pattern: the most successful have a lot more energy and stamina than do others.… I think this helps explain many cases of ‘why didn’t this brilliant young prodigy succeed?’ Often they didn’t have the stamina, or the will, to apply it. I’ve known many such people.”27 Robin also points out that many high-status professions, such as medicine, law, and academia, put younger performers through some pretty brutal stamina tests in the early years of their career. In essence, they are testing to see who has the requisite stamina for subsequent achievement. (You might feel those tests are wasteful in some way, but still, those tests seem to survive in some very competitive settings.) Successful politicians are another group who seem to exhibit very high stamina levels—many of them seem to never tire of shaking hands, meeting new people, and promoting their candidacies. So if we meet an individual who exhibits stamina, we immediately upgrade the chance of that person having a major impact, and that the individual will be able to invest in compound returns to learning and improvement over time. ([Location 1756](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08R2KNYVX&location=1756)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Ideally, what you want is a kind of conscientiousness directed at the kind of focused practice and thus compound learning that will boost intelligence on the job.29 ([Location 1785](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08R2KNYVX&location=1785)) - Tags: [[blue]]