I hate people who are more talented than me. Well, hate probably isn’t the right word. The way I should put this is that in my life I am constantly confronted by people who are more talented than me and this brings out the darker side of my personality. For example, if you watched Apple’s launch event for the iPad, you will notice that about 42 minutes in, they bring up a guy named Steve Sprang to demo an application called Brushes. Brushes lets you paint pictures on your iPhone, and has been used to create, among other things, covers for the New Yorker. I used to work with Steve, and he’s always been smarter than me.
When Steve released Brushes, I told him flat out that a fatal flaw in his plan was that the application would be no good to anyone who can’t draw. He chuckled and kept working. But for me, this fatal flaw persists. I can’t use the thing because I can’t draw. No matter what sophisticated software I might be using, all I ever end up with is a mess.
Clearly Steve can draw. I mean, he developed the drawing program. He must be pretty good at using it. Steve can also ride bike faster than me. And he’s in better shape. And he’s probably a better photographer too. All this, and he’s always been better at writing code than me too.
A lot of people I work with are like this. In our humble Pittsburgh office, we have people who write code and play music, sing and act in plays, make films, fix cars, and write interesting things on the Internet. What gives them the right to be better than me at so many things? How does this happen?
So here is my thinking. I’ve worked hard all my life to be a reasonably talented dork. On a professional basis I can say that I’m probably one guy on the planet who is above average at creating, and, more importantly, fixing the code that computers run to do things for us. I have done this mostly on the strength of one, maybe two aspects of my personal makeup that you might call “talents”:
1. I have good memory for code I write, and I have a knack for “visualizing” how code is organized. This makes it easier to debug things, because I generally don’t have to ask my past self what the hell I was thinking.
2. I am good at not being clever. In large scale software engineering, clever code is the enemy of shipping. But that’s another article.
I’ve always found it astounding that these two humble abilities can provide a paycheck over the long term, but there you go.
Aside from this, everything I’m good at is mostly a matter of practice and experience. When you see as many bugs as I have, you get good at recognizing patterns and guessing what is going on.
I tend to think that everything I’m good at is mostly a matter of practice. People say I take good photographs. I retort that if you shoot as many frames as I do during (say) a birthday party, four or five of them better be good. Some people think that I am a reasonable cook. Again, this is a ruse. When you come to my house, I inevitably cook something that I’ve made dozens of times before. So again, I’ve had a lot of practice. I don’t think there is anything else I’m really that good at. Maybe shopping for bags on the Internet.
So this is what makes me feel bad. I see all these great people in the world who just have a seemingly magic ability to perform tasks that I have no hope of ever managing. And that’s not even what they do professionally. What they do professionally is exactly what I’m also good at professionally. How is that fair?
In the end, I make myself feel better by reasoning that maybe I’m giving them too much credit. Maybe, as I’ve indicated above, it’s not really possible to find the fuzzy line between talent and accumulated experience. This cheers me up for a while, but in my heart I know it’s not true. But ultimately I’m OK with that. I long ago realized that life is too short to worry about being the absolute best at everything you do. I’m happy to muddle through life in my slightly-above-averageness. It gives me time to get out once in a while and shoot some pictures. Or put together that nice beef stir fry for dinner. All in all, a good tradeoff.
I have Brushes, I like it very well, and I can’t draw worth crap.
For example, here’s something I made with Brushes: http://www.flickr.com/photos/cynthiacloskey/4130095200/
The point is not necessarily to be able to create a lovely finished product when you draw (or when you do anything). The doing of the thing is the point.
It’s also true that when you do a thing often, you can improve, and thereby both do it better and enjoy it more. Elizabeth Perry’s Woolgathering drawing blog is an excellent example. She says when she started she couldn’t draw. Clearly she can now. Daily practice has made her better, but I believe she does it because she enjoys doing it, not because she just wants to improve.
Brushes is simple to use, with just enough tools to be powerful but not so many as to overwhelm. It allows you to focus on drawing, wherever you are.
(By the bye, it also makes for a fantastic emergency babysitter, if you have a couple of kids with you and need to keep them distracted for a half hour or so — waiting for a table in a crowded restaurant, for example. I’ve seen it work even better than YouTube videos for this.)
What’s important to you is your business, so I don’t mean to tell you to stop trying to do things well. I want only to highlight that there are different ways to evaluate what is the point of doing a thing.
Pete, everything is a matter of practice. I know there’s a perpetual debate over talent vs. practice (recent popular articles and books by Malcolm Gladwell, Geoff Colvin, et al. come to mind; I follow some of this stuff occasionally), but I strongly believe (hey, I’m Asian too) in the efficacy as well as moral imperative of intelligent, dedicated practice. People with this “magic ability” you perceive might have spent hundreds of hours on what they seem to do effortlessly. For myself, if I try to get better at something, I just think, just as an example, if I spent an extra hour a week developing it, then that’s 52 hours a year, and 520 hours in ten years, and surely I’ll have gotten halfway decent at it while someone else is goofing off that hour a week.
You also forgot to mention that Sprang is much better with a shotgun than you in Counterstrike.
I meant to do that. But in the end couldn’t work it in quite right.
Drawing, I’m told, is also a matter of practice. Start practicing now, and by the time you’re twice Steve Sprang’s current age you’ll be just a good as he is today.
Nice post.
Passion and practice are the keys to success. The hard part is getting over the “I’m no good at this” aspect of something new. If you can practice in private, that helps
As a programmer, I’ve noticed an unrealistic expectation to be able to pick up new technologies or languages and master them quickly. In reality, almost everything takes lots of practice to get good (or great) at – even if your learning curve is lower due to having related experience or natural aptitude.
I’ll always remember a friend from elementary who never wanted to try something new because he knew he wouldn’t be the best at it; most notably skating at the elementary school skating parties. What he didn’t realize was that everyone sucks at skating when they start.
At the risk of starting a tangential argument, go read Gladwell’s _Outliers_
You’re a good writer. That’s much less common than you might think.
I clearly have to look at the incoming comments more often. Sorry about the delay folks.
I’d recommend reading Twyla Tharp’s ‘The Creative Habit’, which addresses a lot of what you are saying here if you can get past the dance-specific stuff.
The gist of it is that what we currently think of as talent boils down to having the interest and drive to practice long enough to have the accumulated experience to make it seem like you have talent. Kind of circular I know, but that is what you get from our current crazy definition of the word, where we prize an imagined innate ability when we see it in others because it lets us off the hook for being lazy ourselves.
Also I’d agree with David. Aside from nitpicky mechanical stuff that an editor could fix, I enjoy reading what you post here which in my books makes you a good writer.
I would think that there must be cases of people who work equally hard at something for an equal amount of time and one guy comes out the other end just better at it. I think it’s true that we don’t want to overestimate the magical importance of talent, but we don’t want to underestimate it either.
I’m friends with r. and I haven’t read Tharp’s book, but I take issue with this idea that talent is just glorified reps.
Some musicians can’t develop the same technique in terms of rhythm or feel no matter how much they practice or who they study with. Other folks just can’t get the knack for improv. Some people don’t end up finding all that much success as even recreational musicians no matter what they do. Even the folks in my own jazz combo cut in various ways along these lines.
Abilities like this vary across all disciplines. Having the most reps and the best work ethic yields rewards in some areas, but there are different abilities, different strengths and weaknesses, different hands we’re all dealt. I must be misunderstanding something – I’m shocked that there is any serious consideration given to “hard work” as some uber trump card. Certainly hard work is required to be “the best you can be”, but everyone has limiters.
I’m the same height and weight as J.J. Redick and Usain Bolt. Would Tharp maintain that any of us could have been the fastest man ever to have lived? I have a friend who kicks my ass on the bike while not putting in a quarter of the training time I do. He’s just faster than me. Can’t play guitar worth a damn, either.
Doing things that are meaningful and rewarding, making a difference, celebrating and leveraging your strengths while exploring and undergirding your weaknesses – that’s your charge no matter what you’re good at or what you enjoy. But don’t tell me there’s no such thing as talent. Talent is all around us and appreciating talent, beauty, and elegance helps us stay open to possibilities in our own lives for growth and development.
Sure, you have a good point boze. I guess my perspective now is that not everything should be attributed to innate ability. Maybe a helping of innate ability, and a equal helping of hard work.
I agree that there are probably a lot of people who can kick your ass on a bike w/ only a quarter of the training. But to be the best or near the best at something, you have to put in some effort, even for those people. There are still going to be people that can do better because they are equivalently innately abled, and put in more work, no? I.e., the amount of effort you inject is really the only thing you have control over, so you might as well make the most of that dimension. Oh and I guess you have some control over which domain you want to play in.
I think the argument I short circuited earlier is that if you only believe in talent as an innate ability then you’ll give up before you ever realize it, because even if you’re hugely talented, you’re still going to suck at the beginning. Which is maybe why so many of us just give up on trying more difficult/creative endeavours and watch TV, which everyone can be the best at.
The other thing I took away from the Tharp book (and I didn’t agree with everything in it either), is that by applying a shitton of practice at something, you will be in a better position to actually act on your talent when the time presents itself. The typical example for me is photography- I can think I have a good eye all I want, and some innate ability to see things better than everyone else. But if I don’t put the work in to learn the rest of the craft, the tools et cetera, then when an opportunity presents itself I won’t be able to take advantage of it to realize my vision (mechanically setting up correct exposure or whatever). Granted you could say that if you were a genius at something, then things like exposure don’t matter and the effect is intended….
r. you sound like you are far too close to Malcom Gladwell’s 10,000 hour theory in Outliers http://www.gladwell.com/outliers/index.html
It turns out we don’t disagree at all then. I guess psu’s main problem is that some of the people he knows are better at every one of his own talents. That would be annoying. Like he should just taking up knitting and not tell anybody.
I can’t speak to coding, but, unlike athletics, music and art are more a question of vision, style, and technique than talent and ability. Take folk music for example, which is hardly a measure of who strums the best or writes the most cliché lyric about heartbreak. So maybe I’m hanging out in a safer arena that’s more about expression than excellence. I like jazz because it seems like a genre with the value of each of those things is in balance.
Here’s the deal…there are always going to be people “better” at things than you are. But you forget that there are also a BOATLOAD worse than you. So, why only focus upwards?
Besides, you are incredibly interesting, which lots of people aren’t.
And you’re a compelling writer. I’ve just spent 45 minutes reading your blog and enjoying your stories (even if I won’t be making artichoke stuff anytime soon).