Thanks for the comment Roman.

Yeah, agree that attitude to personal growth may be an issue. Having too much natural talent in a field might actually not be that good since if it doesn’t feel like a challenge to make progress, it may make it easy to quit upon hitting even minor difficulties. I’ve actually witnessed this myself in friends in mathematics whose parents were professors in math. They sailed through their math classes and didn’t have the motivation to push through, for example, in graduate school or open-ended research in math. That’s why they never achieved anything in the field even though they clearly had the natural talent.

Flow is an interesting state since it can also mean you stay at a lower skill level without progressing, since if the activity stays at the same level of difficulty and you get better, then you will become bored. I agree that it might not be good to stay in it for “too” long, but long enough that it can help you get through the next practice.

As for scientific evidence, the most tangible I can see is taking those with high quant standardized test scores and see how they do in physics/math/engineering and other quant-intensive courses. I’ve seen these sort of studies concern GREs and GPA and performance in grad school. Not perfect evidence, but good evidence and matches my own anecdotal experience.

Another thing we can do is to identify the bottom performers in any field, perhaps detected by standardized tests in that field, and see if they were properly incentivized they could get to the top. For example, see if those at the 10th percentile can work their way up to the 90th, 95th, or 99th percentile.