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Comment by well_i_guess | Hacker News Reader

I think that the issue is that there is no true metric for “highly marketable talents/traits.” One generations genius could be another generations average worker, solely because market forces eliminate the competitive advantage of certain things. Many, many authors seem to lament the distractability of the current generations yet I would bet you many of the most famous people to Gen Z are incredibly attention-fickle. Whereas, 20 years ago, focus would probably be an essential skill for key performers.

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Focus is almost surely an essential skill for key performers. Even among the most famous Gen Z -- you don't think they focus on their social media presence and what they do? What is an 8 hour photo shoot if not focusing? A lot of work goes into what social media influencers post, its not all done on a whim. There's also plenty of Gen Z doing other more traditional work (almost everyone of that generation, really). If anything, they've probably had to develop coping mechanisms from an extremely early age to deal with distraction, compared to prior generations.

I'm reminded of the SlateStarCodex post that mulls over the difference between "real" ADD and just having totally ordinary (but pretty great) difficulty focusing on the exact same boring crap on a computer screen day, after day, after day—especially if, in the latter case, a lot of the people these folks are comparing themselves to, when deciding that they might have ADD, are already on ADD meds (or coke...) for exactly that reason.

If our society needs 1% of the population to be accountants (to pick an example) but only 0.1% of the population either have incredible focus abilities or don't find accounting brain-meltingly dull, then at least 90% of accountants are going to feel like they have a lot of trouble focusing at work. Once enough start medicating (legally or otherwise) it's gonna feel to others like they really do have a condition that most don't, but they both kinda do (in a practical sense, they do need to focus better to keep up with their peers) and kinda don't (in that it's sort of our society that's sick, not them—they're just acting like most people would, in that situation).

My poorly informed impression is that the key challenge of any data driven investigation is striking the balance between how hard something is to measure and how close it is to what you really want to know.

The marshmallow test was so appealing because it was incredibly easy to perform and seemed like it was pretty close to a measure of the kind of self-control and discipline that's needed to succeed in a variety of life's most important challenges.

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