What makes successful academics successful

Fabio at orgtheory has some thoughts:

I’d even agree that talent is the starting point of all academic careers. If you have low cognitive ability, you’ll probably never master calculus or whatever the work requires. But let’s carefully examine what it takes to be a successful professor from the perspective of problem solving:

• You need raw ability to even understand the problem, assimilate the information related to the problem, and execute the solution.
• You need luck and/or “fashion sense” to pick problems that other people care about.
• You need creativity to link ideas so you can discover solutions.
• You need “judgment” and gut instinct to avoid dead ends.
• You need patience to sort through possible dead ends and acquire the skills you need.
• You need a strong work ethic to pursue long term projects to solve problems that don’t have simple solutions and deal with delayed gratification.
• You need time management so you can be a good researcher and a good teacher and a good family person.
• You need “follow through” to actually complete the papers or books reporting your results.
• You need social skills so you can maintain a network of colleagues who can help you.
• You need stamina and maturity to deal with rejections and skeptics.
• You need academic “street smarts” so you can acquire the resources and the job needed so you can complete your work.
• You need writing and communication skills so you can alert non-specialists to your accomplishments.

Once you see the complexity of academic achievement, it’s amazing that people obsess so much over “she’s smart.” Sure, you need smarts, but you need a whole lot more.

A nice piece (though, I do not see as much of comments on it as I would have liked to). Take a look!

Update: Fabio strengthens his arguments with a reference to some research findings on talent, motivation and learning.