There is a very strong correlation between good results and hard work. This is readily apparent in athletics. Those gifted with superior athletic ability, usually discover early in their lives that they are more agile than most, can run faster or jump higher, or have greater physical strength. As they outperform their teammates or competitors, they receive special recognition for their abilities and this usually fuels their drive to hone their skills and achieve more.
Such gifted athletes are often motivated by their early successes to work harder than most to further increase their performance and capabilities. For example, Michael Jordan, a gifted athlete, worked harder than virtually everyone else in the NBA to become the person whom many sports commentators regard as the greatest basketball player of all time.
In the first episode of the documentary miniseries, The Last Dance, released in 2020, the University of North Carolina’s head coach Roy Williams provided insight into the degree of Jordan’s motivation. When the eager young player expressed his desire to be the “best basketball player ever to play at UNC,” Williams zeroed in:
Williams: You will have to work even harder than you did in high school if you want to achieve that goal.
Jordan: I worked as hard as anyone else on my high school team.
Williams: Excuse me, I thought you wanted to be the best player ever to play here.
Jordan: I’m going to show you. Nobody will ever work as hard as I work.
Indeed, Michael over-performed on his promise. Stories of his unrelenting and gruelling practice sessions in which he challenged his teammates are legion. Applying focus and intensity to his learning he developed skills in jumping, ball handling, and shooting that hadn’t been seen before, or perhaps, not even imagined. Certainly, the long hours of deliberate practice were vitally important in the development of these superb skills, but was there some innate talent that was released from the genie’s bottle by his extraordinary efforts–or was he an overachiever of average athletic ability? There was some innate talent, but the hard work was vital to his success.
In every endeavor, hard work is a vital component. Psychologist Gene Landrum, in his analysis of entrepreneurial success, writes:
There seems to be consensus among scholars that there is a positive correlation between IQ and entrepreneurial talent for IQs up to 115 (i.e., within one standard deviation of the mean) but the correlation is weak for IQs above 120. This suggests that entrepreneurial genius is only moderately correlated with IQ, and that a combination of other cognitive abilities come into play… From the profiles in this book and the analyses in the preceding chapters we know that passion, hard work, intuition and tenacity all played a key role in the great entrepreneurial successes. Rarely was inherited wealth, high IQ or patronage the key factor in the ultimate success of an entrepreneur.
Folksy American comedian Will Rogers, in response to the claim that his success was merely luck, responded, “That may be, but the harder I works the luckier I gets.”
