Being a hard worker is easier than being seven feet tall, though. I know it's disingenuous to say hard work will get you everywhere, but working your ass off and being confident about it will get you pretty far.
In my experience, qualitative arguments of the form above rarely change people's minds but a quantitative model will help.
The question asked is the causal network that contributes to mathematical genius and the distribution of contributing causal factors within the population -- P(genius | factors)
Various factors are clearly involved: P(genius | intelligence), P(genius | hard work), P(genius | self-confidence), and so on.
If we accept that those functions are probably not uniformly distributed and that some have a stronger impact than others, we can see that most arguments can be reduced to describing those functions or describing the distributions of those factors among the population.
Where most educated people's intuitions lead them astray is that the experience of segregation in higher education and employment has led them to vastly underestimate the actual variance in factors like intelligence, hard work and self-confidence among people.
Vanishingly few individual actually possess the right combination of factors required for mathematic genius.
It depends, so actual math problems involve creativity and not brute force, though most of the problems in schools involve trying known recopies/algorithms to solve something if you check the problems people solve on international competition all of those involve creativity. But of course without hardwork you will not have a solid base for your creativity to work with.
The question asked is the causal network that contributes to mathematical genius and the distribution of contributing causal factors within the population -- P(genius | factors)
Various factors are clearly involved: P(genius | intelligence), P(genius | hard work), P(genius | self-confidence), and so on.
If we accept that those functions are probably not uniformly distributed and that some have a stronger impact than others, we can see that most arguments can be reduced to describing those functions or describing the distributions of those factors among the population.
Where most educated people's intuitions lead them astray is that the experience of segregation in higher education and employment has led them to vastly underestimate the actual variance in factors like intelligence, hard work and self-confidence among people.
Vanishingly few individual actually possess the right combination of factors required for mathematic genius.