Hey, no judgment. I guess a little bit of judgment. I'd say more than a little bit of judgment.

I'm Angela Duckworth. I'm Stephen Dubner. And you're listening to No Stupid Questions.

Today on the show, when it comes to success, is talent or effort more important?

It's so interesting. And I sometimes say out loud, I will never get bored of this.

Also, what's the issue with using acronyms like POTUS or SCOTUS?

Gosh, I didn't really like the sound of that when you just said that.

I was like, ooh.

It's a little too much like scrotum.

Angela, on this thing called the internet that I was wandering around the other day, I read a five-year-old paper of yours called The Mechanics of Human Achievement.

I like that paper.

I did, too. It was really interesting. And I thought it would be fun to talk about. So I guess my question today would be when it comes to

achievement, what's the best way or a fruitful way to think about breaking down talent versus effort?

So I wrote that paper with a computer scientist, Lyle Unger, and also somebody who had been a physicist before he was a psychologist, Johannes Eichstadt.

And I needed to sidle up to Lyle and Johannes because I wanted to map Newtonian mechanics onto my developing theory of achievement.

And I knew that two semesters of physics in college was not

enough of foundation. And what does that even mean to map Newtonian physics onto your concept

of achievement? Okay. So I took the simplest of Newton's ideas. Remember in high school when

you learned that distance equals rate times time?

Sure.

And then you had to solve just a countless number of problems.

Like a car is going 75 miles an hour.

It's traveling for four.

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