the talent part is being able to convert hard work in meaningful ongoing gains: if you get to the point where you work hard for your maximum amount of productive hours a day and you can&#x27;t improve any further, there&#x27;s nothing else you can do. This is applicable to music, sports, anything really.<p>As much as the genetically blessed people like to say that there is no such thing as luck or talent, in the end we are not all born equal, and some people have something that others don&#x27;t and can use it to reach levels that others can&#x27;t, and some people that have it don&#x27;t have the luck to have had the right parents and environment to be able to develop it fully.<p>Now this is not saying that one can&#x27;t usually become reasonably competent at something via hard work, that is definitely possible, it&#x27;s how we&#x27;re all making a living after all, we are reasonably competent at our jobs. However for fields where the only paying jobs go to the absolute best, being reasonably competent is not enough.<p>According to wikipedia in 2007 there were only 117 US orchestras with a bugdget of 2.5 million US dollars (which to me implies being able to offer a reasonable yearly salary to their members, and even then I am sure most players still have to hustle for lessons and so on to make rent), now assume you are a harp player, that means that there are only about 250 full time professional positions for your instrument in the whole country, or a bassoon player, that would be maybe 400.<p>Now imagine that there were only 400 software jobs available in the US, do you think that being &#x27;reasonable competent&#x27; at programming would be enough to get that job?<p>That&#x27;s where talent comes in, talent alone is not enough, you also need hard work, but hard work alone will never get you there, just like hard work alone will never get you running a sub 10 second 100m or a 4 minute mile.<p>This does not fit well in the &quot;everybody can do it, if you work hard enough&quot; narrative (which has the unfortunate flip side of &quot;you didn&#x27;t make it, therefore it&#x27;s your fault&quot;), but in the end unfortunately that&#x27;s how it is, we are not all born equal or with equal chances, we can do our best, but we all have to accept that sometimes our best is not just going to be as good as somebody else&#x27;s for reasons not under anybody&#x27;s control.