Is High Ability Necessary for Greatness?

As soon as I saw the headline "Research sheds light on origins of greatness" , my interest was piqued. The article is referring to a new paper in Current Directions in Psychological Science, so I immediately downloaded that paper and left the press release open to the side. I'm wary of press releases with these sorts of headlines so best to go right to the source. Scanning the paper, which is coauthored by David Z. Hambrick and Elizabeth J. Meinz, I realize it's a summary of research they've already conducted (some published, some not). As I read about their studies I noticed that not one of them actually looked at greatness.

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