The thing that has always puzzled me is if one's opinion on "talent vs hard work" is actually correlated to one's amount of talent. You can often hear very gifted people say things like "it's hard work that actually matters". At the same time, underperformers' claims that it's the talent that does the thing maybe treated as rationalizations ("I'm lazy, so, yeah, let's blame that on lack of talent, not work"). I don't see any easy way of studying this, though looking for such correlations might prove interesting.
tokenadult|14 years ago
There has been some research on this. Maybe I can open a thread sometime with some link to a good article on this issue. Meanwhile, I am reminded of pg's statement in his essay "What You'll Wish You'd Known"
http://www.paulgraham.com/hs.html
"I'm not saying there's no such thing as genius. But if you're trying to choose between two theories and one gives you an excuse for being lazy, the other one is probably right."