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<p>OK, this isn’t a good argument to make for inherent talent. Let’s remember, the real reason we all have a feeling there’s a notion of inherent talent is that a lot of what we process and figure out happens subconsciously. It’s not like we will ourselves and control every thought we have. </p>
<p>Success in high school and college can very well relate more to how prepared someone was. 2 years of good preparation before high school can make someone astronomically more ready to face high school math than another. </p>
<p>One major reason some people end up just more capable to produce in a subject is that at a young age, their minds were conditioned to think in a certain way. As you grow older, it’s tougher to condition yourself. So this explains a lot of the extreme talent you see.</p>
<p>However, it wouldn’t explain the crazy, out of the blue examples of brilliance, which exist. It doesn’t explain Ramanujan the mathematician, who re-derived tons of mathematics at a pace and style independent of what modern folks at the time were working on, from simple texts. </p>
<p>There IS a sense of innate drive to do something, because not everyone can explain where their own drives came from. And all of us experience it to an extent when we realize that a lot of the truths we hold were realized subconsciously or without our actively trying to force pieces together. The formal reasoning we employ is more of a check to truths’ validity under whatever context we care about - it’s not the source.</p>