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Home › Library › Philology › Hard work trumps natural ability

努力に勝る天才なし doryoku ni masaru tensai nashi Hard work trumps natural ability

This is a philological study of 努力に勝る天才なし (doryoku ni masaru tensai nashi), sold as an old Japanese proverb. It spans a Western commonplace's arrival in Japanese print in 1909, labeled foreign with no author anyone could name, through a quarter-century of rotating attributions, to the exact sentence's first appearance in 1936 — in a book that already calls it ancient — and examines a maxim younger than the electric light it was used to praise.

努力に勝る天才なし · doryoku ni masaru tensai nashi · There is no genius that outranks effort

Abstract

努力に勝る天才なし, there is no genius that outranks effort, is not an inherited Japanese proverb: the two great Meiji and Shōwa dictionaries of Japanese proverbs, 藤井乙男's of 1910 and 中野吉平's of 1933, do not contain it, and 藤井's does not contain the word 天才 at all. The idea, that genius is measured against effort, arrives in Japanese print in 1909, labeled a Western literary man's claim with no author anyone could name, and circulates for a quarter-century under at least five rotating Western attributions — Carlyle, Joubert, Flaubert, Edison, Beethoven — before the exact seven-word sentence first appears in 1936, in a career manual that already calls it 昔から, from of old. The earliest witness to the sentence is also the first to claim it is ancient.

Overview

The sense. The sense is one and has not moved: a gift is real, and effort outranks it. What moved is the shape. For thirty years the Japanese sentence was 天才は努力なり in a dozen phrasings, genius is effort, an equation that redefines genius; the fixed form of 1936 is stronger, because it concedes that genius exists and ranks it second. The only dissent in the record, 1935, is the honest limit of the claim: effort takes you a long way, and genius is not at the end of that road.

The words. 努力, doryoku, is effort. The word is ancient and was rare: the 精選版日本国語大辞典 finds it in a text of about 760 and then not in the dictionaries of the middle ages at all, and says it came into general use only after the Meiji Restoration, when the 哲学字彙 of 1881 chose it as the Japanese for the English effort. So the first word of the sentence is, in its modern currency, a translation word. 勝る, masaru, is to surpass, to outweigh, and it is the verb the sentence turns on: not genius is effort but there is no genius that outweighs effort, a ranking, not an identity. 天才, tensai, is genius or natural gift; this word is old and common, in a preface of 827 and in the 太閤記 of 1625. なし is the classical there is none, and it is the one archaic element in an otherwise modern sentence; the sentence is dressed as a proverb. The 1936 book that first prints it writes the reading まさ beside 勝, which is the reading given today.

The proverb in English. The bilingual dictionaries from Hepburn 1872 to 1946 carry no rendering of the sentence, which is what one expects of a sentence nine years old in 1945 [1]. The English proverb books do not have it: not Buchanan (1965), who has the opposite proverb, A prodigy at ten, a genius at twenty, but after thirty years an ordinary person [2]; not Galef (1987, 2000, 2012), whose nearest thing is a different proverb about genius, 大器晩成, genius matures late [3]; not Zona (1996) or Trimnell (2004) [4]. JMdict has the three words and no entry for the sentence [5]. So the house rendering stands alone.

The historical record

1910 and 1933. The proverb dictionaries, and what they do not hold. Fujii Otoo 藤井乙男's 諺語大辞典 of 1910, the largest dictionary of Japanese proverbs of its age, does not contain the word 天才 anywhere in its twelve hundred pages, and has 努力 only inside quotations of a Chinese poem [6]. Nakano Yoshihei 中野吉平's 俚諺大辞典 of 1933 has no 勝る天才 [7]. What the old proverbs say about talent is the opposite of this sentence: 六歲ノ神童、十六歲ノ才子、二十歲ノ凡人, a prodigy at six, a talent at sixteen, an ordinary man at twenty; 才智ハ身ノ仇, wit is one's own enemy; and from the Analects, 上智と下愚とは移らず, neither the highest wisdom nor the lowest folly can be moved. The tradition had proverbs about effort too, 瓦も磨けば玉となる, even a roof tile, polished, becomes a jewel, but it never set effort against genius, because that was not a question it was asking.

1909. Higuchi Dōgyū 樋口銅牛, 俳諧新研究, page 352. The idea arrives, and arrives labeled: 天才は努力の結果であるとは西洋の某文學家の主張であるさうな, that genius is the result of effort is, so they say, the contention of a certain Western literary man. Foreign, anonymous, and hedged twice. In the same breath he reaches for a Japanese equivalent, the Confucian Hoashi Banri 帆足萬里 teaching that Zhuangzi's prose was made not in one breath but by 鍛鍊, by training [8].

1910. Two self-help anthologies. The same year as 藤井's dictionary, 立志論 prints 天才とは細心の極致なり。カーライル, genius is the extreme of care, Carlyle [9], and 百傑スケッチ 金言対照 prints 天才は大事業を起す而して之が完成するには唯働くを要するのみ, genius begins great works; to finish them needs only labor, credited to Joubert, with Cornell, Macaulay and Stephenson filed as exemplars of effort [10]. Edison had been a stock figure in Japanese school and self-help books since the 1890s. The proverb dictionary and the maxim anthology stood on the same shelf in the same year, and only one of them had met this idea.

1918 to 1944. The sentence circulates with no fixed author. 天才は努力である is given to Flaubert in 1918; 天才は努力なり is a truth in 1922 and a certain philosopher's saying in 1932; 天才は努力の別名なり, genius is another name for effort, papers a student's wall in Uno Kōji 宇野浩二's story of 1928; Kagawa Toyohiko 賀川豊彦 in 1932 gives Edison's line as 九分九厘 sweat and 五厘 inspiration; a banker's maxim book of 1930 has 努力は天才を產み; a book of 1941 says even Beethoven said effort makes genius. Six attributions for one sentence in a quarter century. A dictionary of maxims of 1928 that marks its Western proverbs 西諺 carries three hundred and eighty-three of them, two about genius, and not this one [11] [12].

1935. 実際的家庭教育, the dissent. 天才は學んで達せられる範圍を脫してゐる … 天才は努力だけでは到底達し得ぬ, genius lies beyond what learning can reach; effort alone will never arrive at it. The sharpest reading in the record, and it came before the sentence had fixed [13].

1936. Katō Naoshi 加藤直士, 就職より立身へ, chapter two, 努力と忍耐が何より大切, page 8. The earliest witness to the exact sentence: 昔から『努力に勝る天才なし』といつて、如何なる天分も才能も努力が之に伴はなければ決して眞價を發揮することは出來ぬものと極まつてゐる, from of old they say there is no genius that outranks effort: it is settled that no gift or talent shows its true worth unless effort goes with it. The first book to print the sentence is also the first to call it old. Then the worked example: the student who hates mathematics, encouraged by a teacher, turns the hours he spends on his strong subjects to it, and 性來嫌ひであつた數學が終には好きになつて、立派に自分の一弱點に打ち勝つことが出來る, the mathematics he hated by nature he comes to like, and he handsomely beats his one weak point [14].

1939, printed 1942. A will. The second and last witness before 1945 is a letter. 永田善男, a police official in Manchukuo, wrote to his children before a punitive expedition from which he did not return: 强く正しい人間に成る樣努めよ。努力に勝る天才なしと言ふ事を記憶して置きなさい, strive to become a strong and upright person; remember the saying that there is no genius that outranks effort. The volume that prints it is a memorial book for colonial officials killed in Manchukuo. It is the evidence of what the sentence had become by 1939: ordinary enough to be the thing a father hands a child in place of himself [15].

1944. 世阿弥十六部集評釈. A commentary on Zeami reads the imported maxim back into a treatise of the 1400s: 「天才は努力する者なり」といふ語が眞理を持つて來る, the saying that the genius is the one who makes the effort comes to hold true. The domestication is complete [16].

What is not a source. The Western lines behind the idea are named in the Japanese books, and none of them is this sentence. Carlyle, in the History of Frederick the Great (1858–65): 'Genius' (which means transcendent capacity of taking trouble, first of all); the form the Japanese books quote, genius is an infinite capacity for taking pains, is an anonymous late nineteenth-century proverb made from it [17]. Buffon, as reported in 1803: Genius is only a greater aptitude for patience [18]. Edison, as a newspaper quoted him in 1901: Genius is 1 per cent inspiration and 99 per cent perspiration, and in 1898, Two per cent. is genius and ninety-eight per cent. is hard work [18]. Ruskin in 1878: I know of no genius but the genius of hard work [17]. Joubert's line is known here only through the Japanese books, and the attributions to Flaubert and Beethoven have no footing that was checked. Each of these sets genius and labor side by side; none ranks them as the Japanese sentence does, and the English original of the Japanese sentence, if there is one, has no address anyone has given it. Zeami's 習力 and 帆足萬里's remark about Zhuangzi are Japanese thoughts that the sentence was later attached to, not sources.

The dictionaries today. kotobank has no headword for the sentence in any of its dictionaries; the search returns only the three words. The archive of seven thousand nine hundred and eighty-five public-domain books holds the exact sentence in two, both quoted above, and no variant of it [19].

Today. The house title, Hard work trumps natural ability, is a good one: natural ability is the better rendering of 天才 in this sentence than genius, and it is what the 1936 author meant when he unpacked the proverb as 天分も才能も, gift and talent alike. The literal, there is no genius that surpasses effort, is exact. What a rendering must keep is the ranking: this is not genius is effort but nothing you were born with outranks what you do.

A reading

It is younger than the electric light it was used to praise. It is the sentence Japan made in the 1930s, out of thirty years of repeating a Western commonplace under a rotating cast of authors, when it decided the cult of genius was answerable, and the answer was that effort outranks the gift. It is not an old Japanese proverb, and it is true. The verb, 勝る, is the word that carries the whole claim.

References

  1. The bilingual dictionaries 1872–1946, forty-nine books by full-text search, from James Curtis Hepburn, 『和英語林集成』, 2nd ed., 1872, National Diet Library pid 993689, https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/993689, to 竹原『スタンダード和英辞典』, 1946, pid 1126792, https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/1126792.
  2. Daniel Crump Buchanan, Japanese Proverbs and Sayings, University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, 1965, p. 171.
  3. David Galef, Even Monkeys Fall from Trees: The Wit and Wisdom of Japanese Proverbs, Tuttle, 1987; Even a Stone Buddha Can Talk, Tuttle, 2000; Japanese Proverbs: Wit and Wisdom, Tuttle, 2012, no. 112, p. 130.
  4. Guy Zona, Even Withered Trees Give Prosperity to the Mountain: And Other Proverbs of Japan, Simon and Schuster, New York, 1996; Edward E. Trimnell, Tigers, Devils, and Fools: A Guide to Japanese Proverbs, Beechmont Crest Publishing, 2004.
  5. JMdict, 「天才」・「努力」, at gokanji. https://new.gokanji.com/word/天才
  6. 藤井乙男『諺語大辞典』, 有朋堂, 1910. National Diet Library pid 862766, scan 363. https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/862766/1/363
  7. 中野吉平『俚諺大辞典』, 1933. National Diet Library pid 1453041. https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/1453041
  8. 樋口銅牛『俳諧新研究』, 隆文館, 1909, p. 352. National Diet Library pid 875384, scan 190. https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/875384/1/190
  9. 『立志論』, 1910. National Diet Library pid 758506, scan 22. https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/758506/1/22
  10. 『百傑スケッチ 金言対照』, 1910. National Diet Library pid 758181, scan 56. https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/758181/1/56
  11. The circulating witnesses, 1918–1944, by full-text search, each at the National Diet Library: 『綴り方教授の新研究』, 1918, pid 937806 · 『創造主義の生活』, 1922, pid 969237 · 『教育哲学の研究』, 1924, pid 980029, and 『哲学入門』, 1924, pid 981694 · 宇野浩二『新選宇野浩二集』, 1928, pid 1170483 (reprinted in 『人間往来』, 1936, pid 1222442) · 一瀬粂吉編『銀行業務改善隻語』, 1930, pid 1110153 · 『日向商工大観』, 1932, pid 1107045 · 『地方自治政の沿革と其の人物 熊本県』, 1932, pid 1234599 · 賀川豊彦『神と苦難の克服』, 実業之日本社, 1932, pp. 68–71, pid 1216478, https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/1216478 · 『魂の記録読本』, 1933, pid 1212275 · 『受験本位の作文』, 1934, pid 1457008 · 『日本教育史の研究』, 1939, pid 1074083 · 池田謙三『人間工学 : 技術と人生』, 1941, pid 1123326.
  12. 『金言名句一句千金辞典』, 1928. National Diet Library pid 1109999. https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/1109999
  13. 『実際的家庭教育』, 1935. National Diet Library pid 1442173, scan 52. https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/1442173/1/52
  14. 加藤直士『就職より立身へ』, 東洋経済新報社, 1936, chapter 2, p. 8. National Diet Library pid 1255440, scan 13. https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/1255440/1/13
  15. 『満洲建設烈士遺芳録』, 満洲日日新聞社東京支社出版部, 1942, pp. 263–266. National Diet Library pid 1042940, scan 137. https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/1042940/1/137
  16. 『世阿弥十六部集評釈』, 1944. National Diet Library pid 1125601, scan 242. https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/1125601/1/242
  17. Knowles, ed., Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, 8th ed., Oxford University Press, 2014, Carlyle 18 and Ruskin 2, and Proverbs 326.
  18. Shapiro, ed., The New Yale Book of Quotations, Yale University Press, 2021, Buffon 2 and Edison 2, p. 238.
  19. 「努力に勝る天才なし」, kotobank, no headword. https://kotobank.jp/word/努力に勝る天才なし

Authors

Tim Jackowski (Systems Architect, Takase Studios, LLC) · 典 Ten (Anthropic Claude Fable 5.1, Takase Studios LLC)

AI written · Ten wrote the history. Tim Jackowski commissioned it and answers for it.

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