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important than intellectual ability.
    On the whole, Darwin’s biographers don’t claim he possessedsupernatural intelligence. He was certainly intelligent, but insights didn’t come to him in lightning flashes. He was, in a sense, a plodder. Darwin’s own autobiography corroborates this view: “I haveno great quickness of apprehension [that] is so remarkable in some clever men,” he admits. “My power to follow a long and purely abstract train of thought is very limited.” He would not have made a very good mathematician, he thinks, nor a philosopher, and his memory was subpar, too: “So poor in one sense is my memory that I have never been able to remember for more than a few days a single date or a line of poetry.”
    Perhaps Darwin was too humble. But he had no problem praising his power of observation and the assiduousness with which he applied it to understanding the laws of nature: “I think I am superior to the common run of men in noticing things which easily escape attention,and in observing them carefully. My industry has been nearly as great as it could have been in the observation and collection of facts. What is far more important, my love of natural science has been steady and ardent.”
    One biographer describes Darwin as someone who kept thinking about the same questions long after others would move on to different—and no doubt easier—problems:
    The normal response to being puzzled about something is to say,“I’ll think about this later,” and then, in effect, forget about it. With Darwin, one feels that he deliberately did not engage in this kind of semi-willful forgetting. He kept all the questions alive at the back of his mind, ready to be retrieved when a relevant bit ofdata presented itself.
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    Forty years later, on the other side of the Atlantic, a Harvard psychologist named William James took up the question of how people differ in their pursuit of goals. Toward the end of his long and distinguished career, James wrote an essay on the topic for Science (then and now the premier academic journal, not just for psychology but for all of the natural and social sciences). It was titled “The Energies of Men.”
    Reflecting on the achievements and failures of close friends and colleagues, and how the quality of his own efforts varied on his good and bad days, James observed:
    Compared with what we ought to be, we are only half awake. Our fires are damped, our drafts are checked. We are making use of only a small part of our possible mental and physical resources.
    There is a gap, James declared, between potential and its actualization. Without denyingthat our talents vary—one might be more musicalthan athletic or more entrepreneurial than artistic—James asserted that “the human individual lives usually far within his limits; he possesses powers of various sorts which he habitually fails to use. He energizes below his maximum, and he behaves below his optimum.”
    â€œOf course there are limits,” James acknowledged. “The trees don’t grow into the sky.” But these outer boundaries of where we will, eventually, stop improving are simply irrelevant for the vast majority of us: “The plain fact remains that men the world over possess amounts of resource, which only very exceptional individuals push to their extremes of use.”
    These words, written in 1907, are as true today as ever. So, why do we place such emphasis on talent? And why fixate on the extreme limits of what we might do when, in fact, most of us are at the very beginning of our journey, so far, far away from those outer bounds? And why do we assume that it is our talent, rather than our effort, that will decide where we end up in the very long run?
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    For years, several national surveys have asked: Which is more important to success—talent or effort? Americans are abouttwice as likely to single out effort. The same is