Achievement Isn't "Normal"
Angela Duckworth
Assistant Professor of Psychology
People differ from one another on innumerable dimensions. Many traits follow a bell-shaped, or normal, distribution. Height, for instance. There are outliers, yes, but, even the very tallest man in the world is – at 8 foot 5 inches - only 1/3 taller than the average man.
However, the distributions of objectively measured human accomplishments are typically extremely skewed, with a very long right-hand tail. In so-called “log-normal” distributions, most of us are clumped together at the very low end of the scale, with a small number of outliers besting average performance by a factor of 2, 10, or even 30-fold. These include: number of scholarly publications, number of paintings hung in major art museums, and the frequency with which an author’s work is checked out of the library.
The log-normal distribution of accomplishment is a clue to its mechanics. If achievement requires many different capacities, each of which is normally distributed, then only a rare few individuals will “have it all,” so to speak. It is not enough to be very, very talented, or very, very hard-working, or very, very determined. To be an outlier in human accomplishment, you must, at the very least, be all of these.