All right, we got a question here from Thiego. He says, Does working smarter beat talent? I'm a data scientist and researcher, so I know the value of good work. But you really think an average person who follows this path can achieve a PhD from MIT and make breakthroughs in science?

Yeah, it's a complicated question, Thiego. It's a complicated question in part because talent is very vague exactly what that means. But I do think, yeah, it's realistic to say, no, not every professional objective, ambitious professional objective you have is necessarily achievable. Right? And this might be because of talent.

My personal view is that talent is a complicated picture because it involves a lot of training. And it involves the circumstances for training. It might involve maybe your personality is well-suited to stick with certain types of training. I'm not a big believer in this, just you have this talent that makes it doing really complicated, high-level work easy for you.

High-level complicated work requires a lot of training. But some people end up, now you're 20 years old, and for whatever reason, you've been exposed to and have done a lot of that training. And someone who hasn't, you're in two different places. So I find talent to be a vague issue.

So I don't typically use that term. But I do think it's true. Yeah, not every objective is open to everyone. So for example, I'm going to first be, what would you call it, sort of braggadocious. And then I'm going to humble myself. Right? I'll use myself as an example.

Because you mentioned PhD from MIT. All right. So when I was in college, for whatever reason, I found the computer science work, especially the mathematical or theoretical computer science work, pretty easy. Right? And I always used to think, well, that must be because I had good study habits. I managed my time well, or this or that.

But I received an email like a year or two ago from the fellow student who I used to work with on my theory and algorithms problem sets. And this was the student I like to work with because he was very sharp and we would be very efficient together. And I guess he saw one of my articles or something.

And he sent me a message and said, oh, it was cool to see whatever some article he saw of mine. And he said, my memory from Dartmouth was working with you on some of these problem sets or whatever we'd working on was, oh, I can't do that. I know now I'm not going to be a professor, this or that.

I guess that's what it looks like when someone has a really strong aptitude for something. So that was his memory, is that it caught his attention and tempered his ambition, seeing me working on these problem sets. So I guess there was some sort of thing there that made me good at that.

But then I go to MIT and it became clear after a while of, oh, the top people here, the people who are going to be at the top of the theoretical computer science field, I'm never going to be that. So there's things you can do, things you can't do.

So for whatever reason, I was pretty good at this stuff, but also not the best in the world. And I'm not sure if I would have been able to get to the best of the world. So I don't know, I'm sort of wandering here, which is my way of saying of like, yeah, there are some limits to what you can do.

It's more obvious with physical stuff. I'm not going to play professional sports. I'm still holding out hope I'm going to play professional baseball, but I think that window is closing pretty rapidly here. So it's more obvious there than with intellectual stuff. I think people have more gives and they realize, but some of this stuff gets baked in over a decade of training.

It's really hard to say, but all right, let's put that all aside then and say, so what do we do about it? I say, let's forget about that. Let's forget about talent. Let's forget about, can I do anything I want to do? And ask the better question. What is the real advantage you get from working smarter and deeper?

So being really intentional about how you work and what you work on and how you organize your life. The goal there is not to enable the accomplishment of arbitrarily elite professional accomplishment. The goal is to give yourself the best shot of living a deep life. If you're intentional, if you're deep, if you're organized, you're making the most of your current circumstances, that is the leverage you need to shape your life into something you can control.

That's the leverage you need that when you do lifestyle centered career planning, you can push your life towards the lifestyle that resonates and away from the things that don't. That's what you need to feel engaged and meaningful and competent and efficacious. That is more important than I think hitting some arbitrary professional goal.

I'm not going to be a MacArthur Genius Grant winning top in the world theoretician, but it doesn't mean that I can't use the skills I do have that I am carefully developing to try to build a really cool life. And that friend of mine, who's was very, very smart, he might be saying, okay, I guess I wasn't going to be a professional academic to do theoretical computer science, but I'm sure he's doing something really cool and interesting with his life because he was very sharp and focused and was working with what he wanted to do.

And so that's what I would say, Thiego, who cares about this debate? About how much is, are you born with? How much is it life circumstances that trains you? How much of it can you just change now through deliberate practice? I don't know. Possible to answer. So why don't we just focus on what we can control and try to build the deepest, most interesting life possible, each one that's going to look different.

That's a good question.