While “talentless” hard workers often outshine lazy but talented people, the reverse is not always true.
I come from a very musical family; I cannot reliably distinguish a major from a minor third. (This may mean nothing to you, but it’s an extremely fundamental distinction in Western music.)
I still enjoy listening to music and can distinguish good performances from bad – but I cannot explain exactly why a given performance is good or bad.
However, I have learned how to “engrave” musical scores (it’s an antiquated term, but still used) for family and friends who are musicians – most useful when all we have is a really lousy copy of something they want to perform.
Then you've never met people who are actually gifted.
When I was six years old, I knew my letters and could count but I couldn't read. My parents had moved us to a new school district where I was behind the curve, so my mom taught me how to read. In a few days I was reading at a sixth-grade level, and I've been reading most of my waking hours ever since. Gifted kids are like that.
In college, my freshman roommate Jason used to stay up late studying calculus. I'd learned the material years before, so sometimes out of frustration I'd roll out of bed at 2am and walk him through the assignment so that I could get some sleep. His work ethic was better than mine (he was up studying at 2am), but he lacked talent and eventually flunked out of college.
I'm a big believer in the law of equal and opposite advice. A person of modest talent like Holly needed to learn that with hard work she could achieve an above-average outcome (like being a data scientist with an art hobby and a successful Substack). Jason needed to learn that he just didn't have the brain to be an engineer; he burned out from the workload instead of succeeding. I needed to learn that society is made by and for average people - brains aren't always an asset.
What most people don’t see is that the foundational, hard work at first seeming impossible leads to a joy that’s almost unspeakable. If you’ve ever done something in spite of your doubts and something came out of you that just shines, then you’ll know that the journey really is with the effort. Also, quickly, don’t duplicate. I don’t play bass like Geddy Lee or John Myung but I love to hear them and what I do for myself. Love what you do.
I think you’ve written about this before, at least somewhat, right? If not, I’m totally crazy because I was at a party last week and when someone talked about not doing a type of art they had always been dying to do because they weren’t talented at it, I contradicted the idea that they couldn’t and used your drawing journey and how you talked about it as one piece of evidence that, if they really want to do it, they should try working at it. And take classes maybe. I think your take on this is actually really inspiring: Hey, everyone, that thing you are dying to be good at but are scared to try because you’re not “talented”?? You can actually learn and improve and get to some level of good if you’re motivated. Despite your limiting belief, it’s actually possible.
Yes, i've used this example before in talking about drawing but I've never before gone this hard at the notion of talent as pure and unmitigated horse shit.
So, you have a TALENT for persistence! I know, I know; but it might as well be said to get it out of the way.
I am glad you included the “not all” of prodigies and other geniuses, otherwise more people would have rejected your thesis.
I was greatly disappointed with myself for a long time before I took responsibility for simply not taking the time to do the repetitions necessary to cement certain skills. This is a good reminder. Thanks.
I profoundly agree with the sentiment of your post but disagree with its absolutist nature. As you state - hard work, patience, determination and the willingness to such at something are key attributes to achieving success in most endeavors, but depending on what one’s goals are talent or perhaps more correctly aptitude and some level of physical ability are often prerequisites as well depending on what activity one is attempting to excel or at least become passably good in .Forgive if I perhaps am too personal, but my belief is that while you have admirably made yourself into an artist capable of producing art that is quiet good and commercial in fact, that no matter how hard and long you worked that given your deafness you could never become an accomplished singer. Thankfully, I learned this lesson early enough in life that I could move and still live a happy and successful life to date.
Two of my greatest childhood lives were music ( particularly singing) and baseball. And boy did I practice ping and hard in both of those pursuits. I practiced baseball with my father, I went out for all the school teams, I played pick up sandlot games during the summer - and yet was always one of the last ones picked and the coach usually put me in a reserve role when we had more than nine players on our team. Why, because I have almost no hand eye coordination and am neither particularly strong or fast. So , then I attempted basketball, but like the stereotypical wbite man I can’t jump, along with the lack of coordination 🙂🙂And no matter how many free throws I practiced, I sucked. Same for music, I always was in the school choirs and belted out the lyrics, until one of my teachers recognized that I was tone deaf and always sang off key how much she tutored me. My ego was almost crushed, so I took first piano and saxophone lessons, but never mastered either.
However, when I took up running for heath reasons at age 31, I finally found a sport where some combination practice and obstinacy ( or persistence due to the necessity of me participating in some strenuous aerobic activity for my cardiovascular health) and realistic goal setting ( achieving one of my child desires to some day complete a marathon) have now resulted in me completing my 46th NYC Marathon age age 82 last November . But in terms of speed, no matter how much I trained or what training regimen I adopted my physical limitations have meant that I will at best be a middle of the pack runner for my age group. But through determination and hard work I have exceed the longevity of most marathon participants. But that is because I grew to love it more multiple readings, including the endorphin induced state where your creativity blossoms and you become one with your surroundings.
So, my conclusion , in all your activities- work and play- find things that you love to do but also for which you have some talent or aptitude, or to put it another way , that you have the ability to benefit from the hard work necessary to achieve you goals. It makes the hard work more bearable. Also, and I am not sure if this is implicitly part of Holly’s message - but do not be afraid to listen to a different drummer and march to your own beat at your own pace. Being a slave to social media and viewing yourself in that mirror is not the way to determine either your self worth or your success in achieving your goals.
Sigh. I really didn’t think I needed to say “with the exception of physical limitations like tone deafness or wanting to be a runner with missing legs” or such. I try to respect my readers more than that. But it’s the internet, so apparently assuming common sense is a mistake.
Next time I will spell out the obvious, I guess. JFC.
This is the kindest and most helpful essay you've ever posted (out of many kind and helpful essays). I wish everyone would read it and take it to heart.
My father's favorite student (I think he loved almost all of them but especially this young man) was called Raymond. Raymond was the top student in almost everything the year he graduated. Daddy said "Raymond is not my smartest student - not by a long shot - but Betsy, he outworks everyone. He always tries his hardest and he persists. That's why he's the best." Daddy would just have loved you, Holly.
Great timing for this piece. I’m just turning in after wrestling with a python framework till after 11pm. All work and persistence. (my code is not yet working, even with configuration advice from AI)
I agree with you, Holly. I always joke that I couldn't draw two lines with a ruler, much less a portrait. However, I did my time in art class and got pretty good at drawing scenery. I haven't done it in years and if I wanted to, i could try to pick it back up.
Now, my passion is in writing, and the more I write, the better it reads.
This reminds me so much of a handout I got from my kids' elementary school like a decade ago! It talked about the difference between a fixed mindset and growth mindset and how it was so much better to realize kids will not "get" everything right away and they will need to work for it. And to frame it as "i cant do that YET." ( I think this comes from Carol Dweck's work on the power of yet but I am too lazy to check.)
Such a powerful concept and I feel it also overlaps a bit with Taleb's antifragility somehow. Maybe the lesson is to treat your mind as antifragile and not robust or fragile? Idk.
My father had a NY joke he often repeated: "How do you get to Carnegie Hall? Answer - the same as yours: "Practice." If possible I have an 'anti talent' for meditation. A teacher once told me 'Look for the spaces between the thoughts' and I said to myself - "What spaces?" After years and years of practice another teacher said "Thinking is only thinking, but noticing you are thinking is real!" And I got it.
I am often murderously offended on my younger daughter’s behalf for exactly this type of thing. She is a graphic designer and artist. She often sits in public doing casual sketches, which of course attracts the attention of people who sidle up behind her, have a glance, and — admittedly, while praising her work — say something like “Oh you’re so lucky to be talented. I could never draw like that; I wasn’t born with the gift.” (I’m the one who gets angry — she herself is unfailingly gracious to these halfwits.)
Anne is 30 now, and from about the age of ten has had a pencil in her hand 6-10 hours a day. Being a mother I have saved some of her earliest work and — she wasn’t born with any special talent. Her childhood product looks like any other little kid’s drawings. She became a skilled artist because she worked and worked and worked at it. And no one made her do it. I of course encouraged her to pursue what interested her, and made sure she had the proper materials. She did all the rest.
My daughter is a coder. Apparently she is very good. Good enough to be recruited by google while she was still in college.
I asked her one day if she thought she had a particular aptitude for coding. It's a skill that I don't think I could ever learn. In fact, I took a a coding course once and cried through the first three lessons then quit.
My daughter told me, "no, I don't think I have a particular aptitude. I worked and worked and worked, and when I didn't understand something I found someone who did, and had them explain it to me until I did understand. Then I worked and worked more.
I still think it's aptitude, but she swears it was work and persistence.
I know exactly what you mean about drawing though.
PS: did you ever read "drawing on the right side of the brain?" If not...I highly recommend it.
Your daughter is correct. Coding is just narrating your thinking for a computer. "I want the computer to check if the number the user inputs is prime. The first thing it should check is...." You just translate your thoughts to the coding language. That's literally it.
I think I will start with a quote from an economics professor who was the dean of the college of business at the university I worked at for years: “There’s no such thing as a free lunch.” Spoken at least once after he bought my lunch. (Since I was in public information, he sometimes needed my help, which I was glad to provide.)
There are several aspects to that, but pertinent to your article, there’s a saying among musicians that it takes 5,000 hours of practice to be competent, 10,000 hours to be good, 15,000 hours to reach world class, and three days of not practicing to suck. I don’t recall who it was, but one musician said if he didn’t practice one day, he noticed. If he went two days, other musicians noticed. If he went three days, the audience noticed.
I do believe we all have certain inclinations toward one or more abilities; those we choose to work at we can develop into a “talent.” The rest remain latent unless we choose to pick one of them up.
In my experience, it takes a good 10 years to get good enough at something that it becomes what is called "second nature". I don't have ADD, but I'm interested in so many things that I find it difficult to stay on one pursuit for that long. So I've spent a lot of my life doing things I don't know how to do. There can be great joy in incompetence as well as mastery. Don't let it bring you down.
My husband was a high school dropout. Tired of being a bar bouncer, he got a sales job and excelled at it because hard work. He sold sewing machines by learning and enthusiastically demonstrating every possible stitch, and also teaching himself to repair them. Won many sales awards. Then got tired of that in the early 90s and decided to teach himself computer programming. Bought some little Psion machines and a few books, banged his head against the wall and yelled a lot at first. He ended up an IT manager at a multi national corporation for 25 years and retired with a 6 figure salary right before he died. He also taught himself to excel at endurance motorcycle racing, firearms competition, and was on his way to racing cars when cancer stopped him. I was in awe of that man for 30 years.
While “talentless” hard workers often outshine lazy but talented people, the reverse is not always true.
I come from a very musical family; I cannot reliably distinguish a major from a minor third. (This may mean nothing to you, but it’s an extremely fundamental distinction in Western music.)
I still enjoy listening to music and can distinguish good performances from bad – but I cannot explain exactly why a given performance is good or bad.
However, I have learned how to “engrave” musical scores (it’s an antiquated term, but still used) for family and friends who are musicians – most useful when all we have is a really lousy copy of something they want to perform.
Bravo, and amen.
It's been my experience that "talent" or "being gifted" looks an awful like practicing for six hours every day for a decade.
Yep. It’s embarrassing to think about how I used to walk around imagining I couldn’t draw because the Talent Fairy didn’t like me.
Then you've never met people who are actually gifted.
When I was six years old, I knew my letters and could count but I couldn't read. My parents had moved us to a new school district where I was behind the curve, so my mom taught me how to read. In a few days I was reading at a sixth-grade level, and I've been reading most of my waking hours ever since. Gifted kids are like that.
In college, my freshman roommate Jason used to stay up late studying calculus. I'd learned the material years before, so sometimes out of frustration I'd roll out of bed at 2am and walk him through the assignment so that I could get some sleep. His work ethic was better than mine (he was up studying at 2am), but he lacked talent and eventually flunked out of college.
I'm a big believer in the law of equal and opposite advice. A person of modest talent like Holly needed to learn that with hard work she could achieve an above-average outcome (like being a data scientist with an art hobby and a successful Substack). Jason needed to learn that he just didn't have the brain to be an engineer; he burned out from the workload instead of succeeding. I needed to learn that society is made by and for average people - brains aren't always an asset.
What most people don’t see is that the foundational, hard work at first seeming impossible leads to a joy that’s almost unspeakable. If you’ve ever done something in spite of your doubts and something came out of you that just shines, then you’ll know that the journey really is with the effort. Also, quickly, don’t duplicate. I don’t play bass like Geddy Lee or John Myung but I love to hear them and what I do for myself. Love what you do.
I think you’ve written about this before, at least somewhat, right? If not, I’m totally crazy because I was at a party last week and when someone talked about not doing a type of art they had always been dying to do because they weren’t talented at it, I contradicted the idea that they couldn’t and used your drawing journey and how you talked about it as one piece of evidence that, if they really want to do it, they should try working at it. And take classes maybe. I think your take on this is actually really inspiring: Hey, everyone, that thing you are dying to be good at but are scared to try because you’re not “talented”?? You can actually learn and improve and get to some level of good if you’re motivated. Despite your limiting belief, it’s actually possible.
Yes, i've used this example before in talking about drawing but I've never before gone this hard at the notion of talent as pure and unmitigated horse shit.
So, you have a TALENT for persistence! I know, I know; but it might as well be said to get it out of the way.
I am glad you included the “not all” of prodigies and other geniuses, otherwise more people would have rejected your thesis.
I was greatly disappointed with myself for a long time before I took responsibility for simply not taking the time to do the repetitions necessary to cement certain skills. This is a good reminder. Thanks.
I profoundly agree with the sentiment of your post but disagree with its absolutist nature. As you state - hard work, patience, determination and the willingness to such at something are key attributes to achieving success in most endeavors, but depending on what one’s goals are talent or perhaps more correctly aptitude and some level of physical ability are often prerequisites as well depending on what activity one is attempting to excel or at least become passably good in .Forgive if I perhaps am too personal, but my belief is that while you have admirably made yourself into an artist capable of producing art that is quiet good and commercial in fact, that no matter how hard and long you worked that given your deafness you could never become an accomplished singer. Thankfully, I learned this lesson early enough in life that I could move and still live a happy and successful life to date.
Two of my greatest childhood lives were music ( particularly singing) and baseball. And boy did I practice ping and hard in both of those pursuits. I practiced baseball with my father, I went out for all the school teams, I played pick up sandlot games during the summer - and yet was always one of the last ones picked and the coach usually put me in a reserve role when we had more than nine players on our team. Why, because I have almost no hand eye coordination and am neither particularly strong or fast. So , then I attempted basketball, but like the stereotypical wbite man I can’t jump, along with the lack of coordination 🙂🙂And no matter how many free throws I practiced, I sucked. Same for music, I always was in the school choirs and belted out the lyrics, until one of my teachers recognized that I was tone deaf and always sang off key how much she tutored me. My ego was almost crushed, so I took first piano and saxophone lessons, but never mastered either.
However, when I took up running for heath reasons at age 31, I finally found a sport where some combination practice and obstinacy ( or persistence due to the necessity of me participating in some strenuous aerobic activity for my cardiovascular health) and realistic goal setting ( achieving one of my child desires to some day complete a marathon) have now resulted in me completing my 46th NYC Marathon age age 82 last November . But in terms of speed, no matter how much I trained or what training regimen I adopted my physical limitations have meant that I will at best be a middle of the pack runner for my age group. But through determination and hard work I have exceed the longevity of most marathon participants. But that is because I grew to love it more multiple readings, including the endorphin induced state where your creativity blossoms and you become one with your surroundings.
So, my conclusion , in all your activities- work and play- find things that you love to do but also for which you have some talent or aptitude, or to put it another way , that you have the ability to benefit from the hard work necessary to achieve you goals. It makes the hard work more bearable. Also, and I am not sure if this is implicitly part of Holly’s message - but do not be afraid to listen to a different drummer and march to your own beat at your own pace. Being a slave to social media and viewing yourself in that mirror is not the way to determine either your self worth or your success in achieving your goals.
Sigh. I really didn’t think I needed to say “with the exception of physical limitations like tone deafness or wanting to be a runner with missing legs” or such. I try to respect my readers more than that. But it’s the internet, so apparently assuming common sense is a mistake.
Next time I will spell out the obvious, I guess. JFC.
This is the kindest and most helpful essay you've ever posted (out of many kind and helpful essays). I wish everyone would read it and take it to heart.
❤️❤️❤️
My father's favorite student (I think he loved almost all of them but especially this young man) was called Raymond. Raymond was the top student in almost everything the year he graduated. Daddy said "Raymond is not my smartest student - not by a long shot - but Betsy, he outworks everyone. He always tries his hardest and he persists. That's why he's the best." Daddy would just have loved you, Holly.
Great timing for this piece. I’m just turning in after wrestling with a python framework till after 11pm. All work and persistence. (my code is not yet working, even with configuration advice from AI)
I agree with you, Holly. I always joke that I couldn't draw two lines with a ruler, much less a portrait. However, I did my time in art class and got pretty good at drawing scenery. I haven't done it in years and if I wanted to, i could try to pick it back up.
Now, my passion is in writing, and the more I write, the better it reads.
Keep up the good work, Holly. You're great.
Not sure I agree, but I still love how you write from the heart. And I'm happy that you've recovered from your tick bite. 🌅🎆🌄
This reminds me so much of a handout I got from my kids' elementary school like a decade ago! It talked about the difference between a fixed mindset and growth mindset and how it was so much better to realize kids will not "get" everything right away and they will need to work for it. And to frame it as "i cant do that YET." ( I think this comes from Carol Dweck's work on the power of yet but I am too lazy to check.)
Such a powerful concept and I feel it also overlaps a bit with Taleb's antifragility somehow. Maybe the lesson is to treat your mind as antifragile and not robust or fragile? Idk.
Really nice post thank you for sharing!!!!
My father had a NY joke he often repeated: "How do you get to Carnegie Hall? Answer - the same as yours: "Practice." If possible I have an 'anti talent' for meditation. A teacher once told me 'Look for the spaces between the thoughts' and I said to myself - "What spaces?" After years and years of practice another teacher said "Thinking is only thinking, but noticing you are thinking is real!" And I got it.
I am often murderously offended on my younger daughter’s behalf for exactly this type of thing. She is a graphic designer and artist. She often sits in public doing casual sketches, which of course attracts the attention of people who sidle up behind her, have a glance, and — admittedly, while praising her work — say something like “Oh you’re so lucky to be talented. I could never draw like that; I wasn’t born with the gift.” (I’m the one who gets angry — she herself is unfailingly gracious to these halfwits.)
Anne is 30 now, and from about the age of ten has had a pencil in her hand 6-10 hours a day. Being a mother I have saved some of her earliest work and — she wasn’t born with any special talent. Her childhood product looks like any other little kid’s drawings. She became a skilled artist because she worked and worked and worked at it. And no one made her do it. I of course encouraged her to pursue what interested her, and made sure she had the proper materials. She did all the rest.
OMG YEEEEEEEES! This just made me burst into tears. Thank you so much for saying this. This. Is. The. Truth.
My daughter is a coder. Apparently she is very good. Good enough to be recruited by google while she was still in college.
I asked her one day if she thought she had a particular aptitude for coding. It's a skill that I don't think I could ever learn. In fact, I took a a coding course once and cried through the first three lessons then quit.
My daughter told me, "no, I don't think I have a particular aptitude. I worked and worked and worked, and when I didn't understand something I found someone who did, and had them explain it to me until I did understand. Then I worked and worked more.
I still think it's aptitude, but she swears it was work and persistence.
I know exactly what you mean about drawing though.
PS: did you ever read "drawing on the right side of the brain?" If not...I highly recommend it.
Your daughter is correct. Coding is just narrating your thinking for a computer. "I want the computer to check if the number the user inputs is prime. The first thing it should check is...." You just translate your thoughts to the coding language. That's literally it.
DOTRSOTB is on my list!
I think I will start with a quote from an economics professor who was the dean of the college of business at the university I worked at for years: “There’s no such thing as a free lunch.” Spoken at least once after he bought my lunch. (Since I was in public information, he sometimes needed my help, which I was glad to provide.)
There are several aspects to that, but pertinent to your article, there’s a saying among musicians that it takes 5,000 hours of practice to be competent, 10,000 hours to be good, 15,000 hours to reach world class, and three days of not practicing to suck. I don’t recall who it was, but one musician said if he didn’t practice one day, he noticed. If he went two days, other musicians noticed. If he went three days, the audience noticed.
I do believe we all have certain inclinations toward one or more abilities; those we choose to work at we can develop into a “talent.” The rest remain latent unless we choose to pick one of them up.
In my experience, it takes a good 10 years to get good enough at something that it becomes what is called "second nature". I don't have ADD, but I'm interested in so many things that I find it difficult to stay on one pursuit for that long. So I've spent a lot of my life doing things I don't know how to do. There can be great joy in incompetence as well as mastery. Don't let it bring you down.
My husband was a high school dropout. Tired of being a bar bouncer, he got a sales job and excelled at it because hard work. He sold sewing machines by learning and enthusiastically demonstrating every possible stitch, and also teaching himself to repair them. Won many sales awards. Then got tired of that in the early 90s and decided to teach himself computer programming. Bought some little Psion machines and a few books, banged his head against the wall and yelled a lot at first. He ended up an IT manager at a multi national corporation for 25 years and retired with a 6 figure salary right before he died. He also taught himself to excel at endurance motorcycle racing, firearms competition, and was on his way to racing cars when cancer stopped him. I was in awe of that man for 30 years.