Want to succeed? Better be prepared to work hard!

While it is "pure finance", it is both interesting and important and from time to time it is important to take a step back and think about learning. That is why, in this time of many graduations (and the NFL draft ;) ), this post will appear on this larger blog and not just my class blog. Indeed it may be the most important lesson we can learn! Namely, that success is hard and that talent alone will not get you very far.

From the NY Times (by Stephen Dubner and Steven Levitt)

"Anders Ericsson, a...psychology professor at Florida State University....is the ringleader of what might be called the Expert Performance Movement, a loose coalition of scholars trying to answer an important and seemingly primordial question: When someone is very good at a given thing, what is it that actually makes him good?

Their work, compiled in the "Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance," a 900-page academic book that will be published next month, makes a rather startling assertion: the trait we commonly call talent is highly overrated...expert performers -- whether in memory or surgery, ballet or computer programming --— are nearly always made, not born."

Which may not what you wanted to hear as you begin your careers (or even your summer "break") but is, in some ways encouraging.