Fuck natural talent. Fuck it in the ASS.

And I say that as someone who, by most measures, has an absurd amount of it. I was born with a high IQ, I am amply creative and insightful and witty, and I have a unique and appealing kind of charm.  This means that  there are a lot of things that come easily to me that are an intense and difficult struggle for others.

And that’s the problem, for me and for many others. When important things like schoolwork come easily to you, it sets up an expectation that life will continue to be that easy, and that can inculcate a kind of laziness that says that the important things are the ones that come easily to you and everything else is not worth the effort, and that therefore it’s fine to avoid those things entirely if you can and put minimum effort into them when you can’t.

So basically, it leads to thinking that if it isn’t easy, you don’t have to do it. You can coast on that natural talent for the rest of your life. Anything that suggests otherwise is a grave injustice and completely unfair and cruel beyond all comprehension.

But natural talent only gets you so far.  Sooner or later, you have to work.

No matter how gifted you are, you are going to need to develop the ability to do things you do not feel like doing because they are boring, scary, stressful, or otherwise not the cool easy fun ride you have come to expect out of life.

People – myself definitely included – don’t like to hear this. They continue to pursue the toxic dream of a life without stress, toil, or challenge, sometimes unto the grave.

Life is work. There is no way to escape that. Not even with money – money can make things easier and a lot nicer and more fun, but it can’t maintain a relationship for you, or get you the recognition of your peers, or do any of the other things which fulfill the human needs beyond the two lowest levels of Maslov’s Hierarchy,.

Everything you need to know about human happiness can be found in this chart.

Learning to overcome mere mood and strive to get what you want is a foundational stage in the development of a healthy personality, and natural gifts can delay or even completely prevent this stage of development from occurring.

And that can have a crippling effect on one’s life.

People who know me know that I am talking about myself here. A lot of factors have gone into me being barely starting my adult life in my forties, serious mental health issue being one of them, but denial of the basic truth that life is work is also another of them, and I shudder to think of how big a factor it might be.

The stark truth is, I have wasted a lot of my life’s potential by thinking that if something was hard, that meant I didn’t have to do it.

And it’s truth. You don’t have to do it. You don’t have to do anything at all.

Unless you want to be happy.

For me, it started on my very first day of school. Most of school was laughably easy for me from the very beginning. The things that didn’t come easily, like arts and crafts and gym, were resisted with all my intellect, force of personality, and implacable stubbornness.

I really thought it was an injustice to ask me to do things I “wasn’t good at”.

And that’s the phrase that sparked this little missive of mine. A friend talked about how they were writing something but “weren’t very good at it”, and that got me to thinking about how toxic the whole idea of being good at something can be.

Because when you say you aren’t good at something, what you are really saying is that you aren’t naturally good at it – it doesn’t come easy to you.

That means it is not as immediately rewarding as, on a deep level, you expect it to be. You have internalized this expectation of things coming to you easily, and the implied permission to skip anything that is difficult.

So when you can’t do instantly do something well enough to satisfy this expectation of immediate reward without strain, you conclude that you just “aren’t good at it” and that means you should just stop trying.

Look at this way, it’s easy to see what an utterly absurd and unattainable standard that is. Nobody is so talented that they will produce top notch work the first time they try something. Not even the people who objectively the best at that thing.

Michael Jordan didn’t win his first game of one on one football. Stephen King didn’t write Carrie the first time he sat down at a typewriter.  Even Stephen Hawking did not show up for grade 1 already a scientific genius.

Getting good at something requires doing it without the immediate reward of total success. You have to keep doing it and take your reward for it in the sure and certain knowledge that the more you do it, the better you are getting at it, even if that improvement isn’t immediately obvious.

That’s how I have improved my writing skills. By writing tons of stuff. This thousand word a day blog thing is a big part of it. Some people might be able to learn how to write from books on the subject, but I can’t.

I have learned it by doing it. And truth be told, what keeps me doing it was the fact that writing gives me an outlet for my very deep need to express myself and that makes it well worth the effort and the self-discipline it takes.

So much of life boils down to “just keep doing it”. And people without a lot of natural gifts get this. They fully expect everything to be hard work because that’s been the only way they have gotten anything done for their whole life.

It’s only us naturally talented  types who have the luxury – and the problem – of expecting things to be easy.

Fuck natural talent. Fuck it in the ASS.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.