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The story
A thread on 5ch debated whether the old belief that “effort surpasses talent” has faded from view. Comments piled up like “talented people work hard too, so in the end it still comes down to talent” and “if you’re a genius, putting in effort is easy — it’s way more impressive when someone with no talent works hard,” and the discussion spread into how luck and environment factor in alongside talent and effort. Posters brought up plenty of concrete examples — like a 10-year-old overtaking a 20-year veteran at the Puyo Puyo world championship in just a month, or the theory that sprint speed comes down to leg length multiplied by turnover rate — making it a lively topic that couldn’t be settled with simple willpower platitudes.
What people said
You think a short guy gets treated like a human being if he just tries hard?
It's all genetics, man
Even the 'talent for putting in effort' is part of the parent gacha
That's genuinely messed up
What happens when talented people compete against each other?
Like in school clubs — people put in roughly the same effort but still end up with a gap
Showing people who clawed their way up from poverty working hard is way more inspiring to society
Someone whose only talent is blaming others will never truly succeed
That's a good one
Telling some idiot 'the only talent you have is blaming others' would really sting
But plenty of people end up killing themselves from blaming *themselves* too
And there are plenty of scumbags who exploit that
People always say blaming others means you'll never succeed, but I really don't think that's true
Plenty of people succeed while blaming everyone else, and some even climb the ladder by pushing blame onto others
Society isn't that clean
Leaving aside that this guy's actually pretty talented himself
There's really nothing you can do about something like this
You just do a little and you're unstoppable
If anything, it's way more impressive when someone with no talent puts in the effort
Nah, that's just being dumb
This is honestly true
Since they improve so fast, they probably keep hitting one wall after another, which is rough in its own way
Geniuses have their own kind of struggles
The moment you beat a genius, you get treated as a genius too, so it's hard to even judge
In reality there aren't many geniuses who put in zero effort
Even when you're talented and doing something you love,
it's rare to find someone who makes literally no effort at all
At the end of the day, geniuses and average people both only get 24 hours a day, so the amount of effort barely differs…
And lately a lot of 'geniuses' turn out to have started at age five, so they've actually logged way more hours
Someone without luck ends up never blossoming no matter how hard they try 😭
But you still won't get results if you don't try
In concrete terms, improving your luck comes down to whether you're making a good impression on other people
I think 'good luck' is really just the number of chances you get at good connections
You're comparing the wrong thing, aren't you? That's a comparison against the guy sneering from the sidelines
For starters, back at Re: #216 my comparison was between
'someone with luck who works hard' and 'someone without luck who works hard'
I never said a word about sneering 😓
Mokou had been playing Puyo Puyo for 20 years and got overtaken after the kid had only played for a month
Leg strength I get, but does leg *length* actually matter? 😮
There's a formula where leg length × turnover rate equals running speed
Guys like Usain Bolt have insanely long legs
First time hearing that theory
Might need to rethink my position a bit 😮
Thanks (net slang) 🙂↕
Maybe he'd pass in a year, who knows
Isn't the result everything?
You can't know the result before you even start
Yes you can
You've probably never trained in baseball,
but you know you have zero chance of beating Shohei Ohtani, right?
Like, say you have a talent for languages and you work hard to develop that ability further — you could say you correctly judged your own talent and succeeded
But if that same person had no talent for math and abandoned languages to grind at math instead, would that count as success?
Only someone with a screw loose would deny that at this point
Unfortunately talent doesn't get inherited though
Just look at guys like Kazushige Nagashima or Goro Miyazaki, it's pretty obvious
Where do you draw the line on what counts as talent?
Kazushige did go pro, so from an ordinary person's perspective he's incredibly talented — but if talent doesn't count unless you reach the very top, then I guess he doesn't have it
Both guys mentioned as examples had fathers who were hardcore hard workers, while the sons weren't so much — doesn't that actually highlight how important effort is?
Background and Key Points of the Debate
The phrase “effort surpasses talent” is said to trace back to the Showa-era spirit-sports-manga mindset, and in recent years terms like “parent gacha” — which frame one’s origins and innate qualities as products of luck — have spread, increasingly casting the two ideas as opposites. What split opinion in the thread was whether effort should be seen as “a necessary condition for great achievement” or as “the condition that determines the outcome.” Some argued that since the closer you get to the top the harder the talented ones are also working, effort alone can rarely close the gap; others pointed out that whether talent blossoms at all is itself shaped by environment and luck. It’s worth noting the thread offered no concrete data on the correlation between effort and results — this was a discussion built purely on individual impressions and anecdotes.
*This article is excerpted and summarized from the 5ch (Nandemo Jikkyo G) thread “[Vanished] Hasn’t the worldview of ‘effort surpasses talent’ completely disappeared from this world?“.
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