This article agrees somewhat with my pet model of the relationship between intelligence and achievement. That is, (assuming you pass a certain threshold; you aren’t going to be a particle physicist with an 85 IQ) natural talent is only the dominating predictor of performance twice: when you don’t have that much practice at something and when you’re bumping up against the current limits of what can be done (e.g. when you’re late in your chess career or have seen all the gains from practice you can).

Obviously intelligence matters when you’re starting out in a field: if you can learn things more quickly and more completely than the next person, you’ll have a head start that can’t be beat with raw practice. It’s similarly self-evident that it’s necessary when you’re close to the “end” of your field: it’s /hard/ to push boundaries and do things no one has before. Mark Kac’s quote about “magical geniuses” comes to mind.

I think people spend a lot of time in the early stages of a field (I graduated with a math major and I’m still just starting out in math!) and I feel like this tends to bias people towards saying that intelligence is a dominating factor for performance over a lifetime. However, I think this neglects the fact that 99% of a given field lies somewhere between the absolute beginning and the absolute cutting edge.

This is something I’ve noticed: nearly all the high achievers I know are reasonably intelligent people who are crazy passionate. I knew people in my friend group at college who went on to get {Masters,PhDs} at {Stanford,MIT} and out of all 4 of them only one was exceptionally smart IMO (over 1/1000 rarity).

This also leads me to the conclusion that most people you see who seem crazy smart are probably a fairly normal level of smart with effort added to taste. The argument for this isn’t ideological - it’s statistical. There are simply so many more above-average people than there are exceptional people that most of the really high (but not world class) performers come from the former group.