Hard work trumps natural ability

努力に勝る天才なし (doryoku ni masaru tensai nashi): there is no genius that outranks effort. Talent is real, and effort outranks it; the verb 勝る, to surpass, carries the whole claim, and 天才 here is natural ability, the gift and the talent alike, as the 1936 author who first fixed the sentence unpacked it. The idea arrived in Japanese print in 1909, labeled foreign, and for thirty years ran as genius is effort in a dozen phrasings under a rotating cast of Western names; the fixed form of 1936 is stronger, because it concedes that genius exists and ranks it second. It is younger than the electric light it was used to praise.