Duckworth: Superachievers possess rare, interacting combinations of traits
Angela Duckworth · Angela Duckworth on her new book, the limits of grit, and her advice to founders | Masters of Scale · May 16, 2024 · at 40:40
Psychologist Angela Duckworth discusses why top performance distributions are skewed rather than normally distributed on Masters of Scale.
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“A normal distribution comes from multiple factors happening, but they're additive. They don't interact with each other. So, for example, height is normally distributed because there are over a thousand genes that determine your height. But they don't interact with each other very much, so it's just like, oh, you know, flip this switch on, flip this switch off, whatever. But what I think happens at the tail in superachievers is they have a combination of features that are very rare together. They're rarely found in the same person, and they often interact.”
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