"Genius is 1 percent inspiration, 99 percent perspiration," said Thomas Edison, and he should've known: It took him hundreds of tweaks to get his incandescent light bulb to work well, and he was already building on the work of 22 earlier inventors of incandescent lights.

On the other hand, Nikola Tesla had this to say about Edison's methodology:

If Edison had a needle to find in a haystack, he would proceed at once with the diligence of the bee to examine straw after straw until he found the object of his search. [...] His method was inefficient in the extreme, for an immense ground had to be covered to get anything at all unless blind chance intervened... [...] I was almost a sorry witness of such doings, knowing that a little theory and calculation would have saved him ninety per cent of his labor.

Even allowing for a significant bias against Edison on Tesla's part, it does seem like he relied on perspiration to an extraordinary degree among high achievers. Of course, even that diligence wouldn't have been of much use if it hadn't come together with a very considerable talent.

More generally, there are two problems with the general message of this article:

1. It is delusional for most people to believe that they can contribute usefully to really hard problems. (Except in trivial ways, like helping those who are capable of it with mundane tasks in order to free up more of their time and energy.) There is such a thing as innate talent, and doing useful work on some things requires an extraordinary degree of it.

2. There is also a nasty failure mode for organized scientific effort when manpower and money are thrown at problems that seem impossibly hard, hoping that "hacking away at the edges" will eventually lead to major breakthroughs. Instead of progress, or even an honest pessimistic assessment of the situation, this may easily create perverse incentives for cargo-cult work that will turn the entire field into a vast heap of nonsense.