Science

When I was in college, a professor made a claim that stopped me mid-note: “Intelligence is about 50-80% heritable. Your genes, not your effort or education, largely determine how smart you’ll be.” I was stunned. And honestly, a little angry. I’d grown up believing that hard work mattered most. That anyone could achieve anything with enough effort. That your background didn’t determine your destiny. Was all of that naive? Were we just puppets dancing to our genetic programming? ...

I was reading a psychology paper that promised to change how I thought about willpower. The study claimed that ego depletion—the idea that willpower is a limited resource that gets exhausted—had been proven through rigorous experiments. Hundreds of studies supported it. It was taught in psychology courses. It was in textbooks. I built my productivity system around this concept. I scheduled important decisions for the morning. I avoided making choices when I was tired. I believed willpower worked like a muscle that could be depleted. ...