If you have not been blessed with a superior talent, intellect, genius or had access to a good education fear not because whilst you are beavering away, the person who has had all these privileges is probably finding some excuse for not cracking on with the task at hand and you therefore have every opportunity to excel beyond them. So for me it is always persistence over intelligence (or any other gift the other guy might have). A good example of this and a bloody good read to boot is At Large: The Strange Case of the World's Biggest Internet Invasion by David H. Freedman, Charles C. Mann, which is above all a story about persistence.