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. Author manuscript; available in PMC: 2016 Jul 1.
Published in final edited form as: Soc Personal Psychol Compass. 2015 Jul 2;9(7):359–369. doi: 10.1111/spc3.12178

Figure 1.

Figure 1

An illustration of achievement, skill, and talent based on published data on the acquisition of telegraphy receiving skill averaged across seven operators (William & Harter, 1899). Skill was originally reported as the number of words per minute that could successfully be received in Morse code and then translated into English. Achievement in this graph is calculated as the total number of words received (assuming 20 hours of work a week), and talent is calculated as the rate of change in skill. Lines of best fit are superimposed (linear for skill and talent, and a parabola for achievement), suggesting talent can be approximated as a constant, skill as a linearly increasing function, and achievement as a quadratic function, as stipulated by our framework.