Talent Not Required — The Tedious Ordinariness of Success
Out of every one hundred men, ten shouldn’t even be there, eighty are just targets, nine are the real fighters, and we are lucky to have them, for they make the battle. Ah, but the one, one is a warrior, and he will bring the others back.
― The Cynic Epistles (source unknown, possibly Heraclitus)
In The Knowledge, Steven Pressfield shares his views on talent:
I’ve seen a million writers with talent. It means nothing. You need guts, you need stick-to-it-iveness. It’s work, you gotta work, do the freakin’ work. That’s why you’re gonna make it, son. You work. No one can take that away from you.
In an interview with The Harvard Business Review, legendary head coach Bill Walsh (who took one of the worst teams and made them one of the best), had the following to say:
In teaching skills to your players, how do you organize your own thinking about the players you are trying to reach?
Take a group of ten players. The top two will be supermotivated. Superstars will usually take care of themselves. Anybody can coach them. The next four, with the right motivation and direction, will learn to perform up to their potential. The next two will be marginal. With constant attention, they will be able to accomplish something of value to the team. The last two will waste your time. They won’t be with you for long. Our goal is to focus our organizational detail and coaching on the middle six. They are the ones who most need and benefit from your direction, monitoring, and counsel.
In Can’t Hurt Me, David Goggins says:
Our culture has become hooked on the quick-fix, the life hack, efficiency. Everyone is on the hunt for that simple action algorithm that nets maximum profit with the least amount of effort. There’s no denying this attitude may get you some of the trappings of success, if you’re lucky, but it will not lead to a calloused mind or self-mastery. If you want to master the mind and remove your governor, you’ll have to become addicted to hard work.
If you have a calling, this gutwrenching feeling that just won’t go away, that nagging voice in your head that you’re not doing what you’re supposed to be doing… well, then you might be running away.
AMATEURS, PROS, AND SUPERSTARS
In The War Of Art, Steven Pressfield says that whenever people have a calling and try to do the work, there’s this force that pushes them away from doing what they’re supposed to be doing.
That self-sabotaging, he calls it The Resistance.
The amateur runs away from The Resistance. Not just by avoiding to start and take action but oftentimes by living a ‘’shadow life and career’’.
Sometimes, when we’re terrified of embracing our true calling, we’ll pursue a shadow calling instead. That shadow career is a metaphor for our real career. Its shape is similar; its contours feel tantalizingly the same. But a shadow career entails no real risk. If we fail at a shadow career, the consequences are meaningless to us.
Are you pursuing a shadow career? Are you getting your Ph.D. in Elizabethan studies because you’re afraid to write the tragedies and comedies that you know you have inside you? Are you living the drug-and-booze half of the musician’s life, without actually writing the music? Are you working in a support capacity for an innovator because you’re afraid to risk becoming an innovator yourself? If you’re dissatisfied with your current life, ask yourself what your current life is a metaphor for. That metaphor will point you towards your true calling.
Turning Pro — Steven Pressfield
The only way to overcome it is to stop running away and face it.
To let go of amateur habits and develop professional habits.
The amateur waits until inspiration strikes, until they’re motivated enough. The professional knows this moment will never come by just waiting around. Instead, by simply ‘showing up’ as Seth Godin would say, you create the opportunity to get inspiration.
START SMALL TO DO BIG THINGS
We know from B.J. Fogg’s work that if we want to make lasting change, it’s more effective to start small rather than big. This is why New Year’s resolutions fail. People set themselves up to fail by not starting small.
If you want to go from an amateur to a professional, give yourself permission to do it gradually. By giving yourself small wins, you’ll slowly start to see yourself differently.
THE MUNDANITY OF EXCELLENCE
In his 1989 paper, The Mundanity of Excellence, Daniel Chambliss studied excellence.
In order to control as many confounding variables as possible, he looked at competitive swimming.
He came to the following conclusions:
1. Excellence is a qualitative phenomenon. Doing more does not equal doing better. High performers focus on qualitative, not quantitative, improvements; it’s qualitative improvements which produce significant changes in level of achievement;different levels of achievement really are distinct, and in fact reflect vastly different habits, values, and goals.
2. Talent is a useless concept. Varying conceptions of natural ability [..] tend to mystify excellence, treating it as the inherent possesion of a few; they mask the concrete actions that create outstanding performance; they avoid the work of empirical analysis and logical explanations (clear definitions, separable independent and dependent variables, and at least an attempt at establishing the temporal priority of the cause); and finally, such conceptions perpetuate the sense of innate psychological differences between high performers and other people.
3. Excellence is mundane. Excellence is accomplished through the doing of actions, ordinary in themselves, performed consistently and carefully, habitualized, compounded together, added up over time. While these actions are ‘’qualitatively different’’ from those of performers at the other levels, these differences are neither unmanageable nor, taken one step at a time, terribly difficult. […] The action, in itself, is nothing special’the care and consistency with which it is made is.
FROM PROFESSIONAL TO SUPERSTAR
When we decide to become a professional, we drop our amateur habits.
We no longer allow ourselves to be seduced by short-term gratification and instead, do the work we said we were going to do.
We show up daily, do the most important things, and make sure they get done.
But there’s a level above being a mere professional.
You see, in different areas of our lives, we exhibit different attitudes.
Maybe when it comes to dancing we’re an amateur. It’s just for kicks and giggles.
Maybe when it comes to our current job we’re professionals, because we don’t want to get fired.
But being a superstar means you’re not just doing what is expected, you’re trying to approach your true potential (forgive me for using this cliche).
If there’s some asymptote that represents what we’re capable of in the field of our calling, then being a superstar is to get ever closer to that asymptote.
No one can tell you whether you are one or not. But you know. Look in the mirror and you know.
Are you an amateur, are you a professional, or are you a superstar in your field?
Every morning you will have to make this choice. Every night it resets.
It’s free. It’s simple. But it’s not easy.
JUST SHOW UP DAILY AND DO THE WORK
I would like to end this essay with a final quote from The Autobiography of Anthony Trollope (an English novelist in the 1800s):
Nothing surely is so potent as a law that may not be disobeyed. It has the force of the water drop that hollows the stone. A small daily task, If it be really daily, will beat the labours of a spasmodic Hercules. It is the tortoise which always catches the hare. The hare has no chance. He loses more time in glorifying himself for a quick spurt than suffices for the tortoise to make half his journey.
I have known authors whose lives have always been troublesome and painful because their tasks have never been done in time. They have ever been as boys struggling to learn their lessons as they entered the school gates. Publishers have distrusted them, and they have failed to write their best because they have seldom written at ease. I have done double their work — though burdened with another profession, — and have done it almost without an effort. I have not once, through all my literary career, felt myself even in danger of being late with my task.
[…]
There are those who would be ashamed to subject themselves to such a taskmaster, and who think that the man who works with his imagination should allow himself to wait till — inspiration moves him. When I have heard such doctrine preached, I have hardly been able to repress my scorn. To me it would not be more absurd if the shoemaker were to wait for inspiration, or the tallow-chandler for the divine moment of melting.
I am ready to admit the great variations in brain power which are exhibited by the products of different men, and am not disposed to rank my own very high; but my own experience tells me that a man can always do the work for which his brain is fitted if he will give himself the habit of regarding his work as a normal condition of his life. I therefore venture to advise young men who look forward to authorship as the business of their lives, even when they propose that that authorship be of the highest class known, to avoid enthusiastic rushes with their pens, and to seat themselves at their desks day by day as though they were lawyers’ clerks; — and so let them sit until the allotted task shall be accomplished.
REFERENCES
Chambliss, D. (1989). The Mundanity of Excellence: An Ethnographic Report on Stratification and Olympic Swimmers. Sociological Theory, 7(1), 70. doi: 10.2307/202063
Fogg, B. (2019). Tiny habits. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
Goggins, D. (2019). Can’t hurt me (1st ed.). Lioncrest Publishing.
Pressfield, S. (2003). The War of Art. Black Irish Entertainment LLC.
Pressfield, S. (2012). Turning pro. Black Irish Entertainment.
Pressfield, S. (2016). The Knowledge (1st ed.). Black Irish Entertainment LLC.
Rapaport, R. (2020). To Build a Winning Team: An Interview with Head Coach Bill Walsh. Retrieved 27 February 2020, from https://hbr.org/1993/01/to-build-a-winning-team-an-interview-with-head-coach-bill-walsh
Trollope, A. (2020). Autobiography of Anthony Trollope: Chapter 7 (continued) — The Literature Page. Retrieved 27 February 2020, from http://www.literaturepage.com/read/trollope-autobiography-80.html
