It’s Tough Either Way

Some get there through hard work. Others via raw talent. We tend to admire the gifted guy (he makes it look easy). Even envy him (he didn’t have to slog).

Until I read this passage from Haruki Murakami’s book, Norwegian Wood, I didn’t realize that the gifted guy is often incapable of hard work. Here’s why:

“You see them do it, and you’re overwhelmed. You think, ‘I could never do that in a million years.’ But that’s as far as they go. They can’t take it any further. And why not? Because they won’t put in the effort. Because they haven’t had the discipline pounded into them…They’ll take some piece another kid has to work on for three weeks and polish it off in half the time, so the teacher figures they’ve put enough into it and lets them go to the next thing. And they do that in half the time and go on to the next piece. They never find out what it means to be hammered by the teacher; they lose out on a certain element required for character building.”

Wow! I never thought of that angle.

Then there’s the guy who mastered something through hard work. With experience, he gets even better at it. Unfortunately that very excellence makes him avoid something new, something at which he is not good at already. As Seth Godin wrote:

“Possibility, innovation, art--these are endeavors that not only bring the whiff of failure, they also require us to do something we're not proven to be good at…We often stop surprising ourselves (and the market) not because we're no good anymore, but because we are good. So good that we avoid opportunities that bring possibility.”

Looks like there’s a downside to everything, including talent and hard work!