August 04th, 2023

       Inspiring Bullshit: Talent, Hard Work, and Luck

The MMA fighter Conor McGregor once made a statement about the illusion of talent, claiming that success in any field was really just a matter of sweat equity. Here’s the exact quote:
“There’s no talent, this is hard work. This is an obsession. Talent does not exist, we are all equal as human beings. You could be anyone if you put in the time. You will reach the top, and that’s that. I am not talented. I am obsessed.”
It’s an inspiring quote, the kind of thing a kid starting out on a long, hard journey might write down, and reread in their more dejected, less motivated moments. And I’ve no doubt that Mr. McGregor believes it to be true.
But is it?
Greats in their field—whatever it may be—obviously put in a lot of work. One basketball player (I can’t remember who) talked about always wanting to be the first one on the court. But every time he rose bright and early with that intention, he’d enter the gym to see Larry Byrd already there, sinking buckets.
He’d come in at six a.m., just as the sun was coming up, and find Byrd working as faithfully as a metronome. Undaunted, this same baller would come the next morning much earlier, well before the rooster crowed and the sky was still black. And there would be Larry—maybe a touch less sweaty than he might’ve been around 6 a.m.— but still hitting nothing-but-net shots from the free throw line.
The bassist Flea of The Red Hot Chili Peppers said he practiced so long that the strings finally sliced a hole in his finger. This hole was so deep that even touching it caused agony, forget about slapping the bass, as is Flea’s trademark. Rather than heading to the hospital for treatment, though—which would have required stopping playing—Flea filled the hole with glue and got back to work.
One might question Flea’s judgment—boxers can lose fingers to staph infections if left untreated—but you can’t question the man’s heart.
I myself (no great talent) have a giant callus bulging from the back of the ring finger of my right hand. This comes from a long time ago, when I was a young writer still learning my chops, and writing longhand with a pencil in a notebook. I was so consumed with the task of writing that I was not conscious of the pain caused by the pencil’s rubbing against the finger for hours on end.
Those hours were fun, but only because I was trying to immerse myself in something—anything—to distract me from the collapse of my parents’ marriage.
So trauma might help, some incident, situation or unpleasantness that causes one to seek refuge from a storm in their art, craft, sport, whatever.
And it should go without saying that the more you do something, the better you will get at it. But if you do it obsessionally, is greatness guaranteed?
There’s something tautological and faulty about all these rhetorical questions I keep lobbing at you, dear reader.
Because the truth is I think that talent is real, that we are not all equal in skill. Whether you think such blessings come from the Creator or a CRISPR, we have stores of inborn talent in some places, and deficits in others. Skill is genetic, and prodigal and freakish talent is as capricious as the weather, handed out as randomly as left-handedness or a pollen allergy.
Let’s say we performed a strange exercise, something like those language deprivation experiments practiced by the ancients. Let’s say we took Shaquille O’Neal and from birth trained him in nothing but dramaturgy, giving him everything from Aristotle’s Poetics to the complete works of the Bard. Once he had completed his very directed, narrow education—cloistered away to study—we gave him an Underwood and a personal attendant to see to his more prosaic needs. He would have ample, endless time to improve his mastery of everything from syntax to more overarching issues like catharsis. He would live, essentially, like Friedrich Hölderlin did during the final years of his life, confined to a tower and left to do nothing but craft masterpieces. Only Shaq would be unencumbered by the schizophrenia that (allegedly) affected Hölderlin’s output.
Meanwhile, simultaneously, we would have been training a young David Mamet for a career as a basketball player at an undisclosed location in the Rocky Mountains. The seclusion would be complete, allowing him great focus, and the altitude would help him work on lung capacity. He would be worked to the point of physical exhaustion to build up manual dexterity, hand-eye coordination, and leg strength, every day; the greatest pro ballers would come in on a daily basis to teach him perfect form on everything from ball handling to the fadeaway shot.
Once both our Shaq and David Mamet clones—grown from the respective stem cells of both men—reached maturity, they would begin to share their gifts with the world. Presumably—if talent were not real— Shaq’s dramatic works would quickly gain him a reputation as a master of tough, realistic dialogue. David Mamet would dominate the NBA for a decade, having trouble only when he shot from the free throw line and tossed up one brick after another.
Conor McGregor’s words—once so inspiring—now start to seem absurd.
But wait, I can hear the hypothetical reader protesting, Mamet’s nowhere near as tall as Shaq! This isn’t fair!
No, it isn’t, but neither is the way talent is apportioned, being as much a matter of what’s inborn, there from the beginning, as what’s acquired.
Let’s keep going with our hypothetical a little longer just to make another point or two about the fickleness and caprice of it all. Let’s say Shaq has more luck writing plays than Mamet does on the hardwood. Let’s say that, despite his gargantuan size, Shaq doesn’t find the narrow desk and chair constricting. That he achieves genuine inspiration hunting and pecking at the Underwood all those years. He crafts some memorable curse-laden bon mots and the enviable repartee between players is exactly the kind of stuff actors want to sink their teeth into. Shaq’s soliloquys are so inspired that they become go-to devices for actors showing their stuff before agents at casting calls. Character arcs are believable but not predictable, and genuine pathos is achieved. It all adds up to a flawless three-act play, which captures all the contradictions of human behavior and tragedy of the human condition: addiction, mortality, family psychodrama, the works. And, in order to keep things from becoming bathetic or ridiculous, Shaq has hedged his bets and gilded his play’s most serious moments with humor.
He still has to get that play into the hands of someone with the juice to finance a production, and people still have to come to see it. That brings in even other and more unjust elements we haven’t heretofore considered: luck and chance. How many great works flopped upon debuting, only to find their intended audience decades, sometimes centuries, after the deaths of their creators?
Musicians who’ve shown great talent in their early prodigy years have died of maladies that a century or two hence would have been easily curable. Great actors on the cusp of realizing their potential flip their cars and die in the burning wreckage. James Dean wasn’t the only one, either; Google “Tom Pittman” if you don’t believe me.
And those are the ones who lived long enough to tease the world with a foretaste of their greatness to come. Someone else with the potential of Brando may have died in the cradle of SIDs before they even got that chance.
These are all unpleasant scenarios, and no more are necessary to make my point. And it’s also worth stating that it is true that we in fact make our own luck, or at least some of it. Persistence does help.
But persistence—and the desire to keep going with one’s training, their study, development of their craft—is also tied to talent.
Recall for a moment what Malcolm Gladwell said in his book Outliers, about the “ten-thousand hour rule.” Gladwell’s star has waned quite a bit since the elite once feted him and advertised his theories in bright shining neon, but he was more or less right. In order to get great at something, you must not only train for a long time, but train correctly.
There’s a funny scene in The Simpsons in which Lenny confront Rainier “McBain” Wolfcastle in Moe’s Tavern. “I used your ab roller and got no results!” Lenny says, adopting a tone it might not be wise to use with one so buff as Wolfcastle.
Rather than getting pissed, though, Wolfcastle quickly deduces the problem. He spins Lenny around and flips the back of the barfly’s shirt up. “You’re using it backwards,” Wolfcastle says.
And there, on Lenny’s back, is the proof: a series of perfectly cobbled washboard abs growing along the midpoint of his yellow spine.
The “correctly” part seems to be where the talent comes into play. When one tries to do something for which they don’t have an innate talent, they will obviously get better the more of it they do. But when one lands upon the thing they were born to do—if they are lucky enough to be so blessed—a kind of feedback loop is established. The brain and body respond in a way that makes one want to continue, makes it second nature so that one is not even aware of what they’re doing.
Like masturbation or falling asleep or listening to music, you find yourself doing it regardless of what your intention was. It’s a fugue state, a hypnotic, maybe even hypnogogic state between waking and dreaming. There’s no conscious thought, only the brain and body absorbing the new lessons being constantly imparted, and an electric joy at demonstrating one’s newfound power. It’s a metal file to magnet, or dog to tennis ball arcing through the air. There’s a “rebound” effect, a call and response that happens, rather than a shouting into the dark and not getting a response, not even a faint echo.
Right now, for instance, I’m trying to learn more about astronomy. I bought a refractory scope on a polar mount. This is not the best choice for a novice (a Dobsian would have been better) but I chose it because it looks the most like the traditional telescope. And I am learning how to use it, albeit slowly.
Yes, it’s a slog and I’ve gotten discouraged many times, wanted to take the thing, fold its metal legs, and put it in the hall closet.
Trying to conceive of latitude and longitude in terms of declination and right ascension—moving along a three-dimensional celestial equator—is kicking my ass. Visual-spatial reasoning has never been my strong suit. Were I to attempt to draw man, a house, or a man in a house right now, it would be laughable.
Even as a child when I read comics, I would stick to reading the caption bubbles to get the story and almost have to remind myself as an afterthought to look at the pictures. Like the foundling Kasper Hauser, I see better through words than through pictures, and might feel blind without this constant recourse to words. To writing and reading books.
Obsession is a strange thing, in that it is both powerful and pathetic. One can’t control it; it controls one.
And yes, with more time and patience I will get better at using that telescope. But I will never get as good at astronomy as I am at writing, or learning new languages, or acing the cognitive portion of standardized tests. Or guessing the plot twists in movies with reputations as being unpredictable, masterfully constructed puzzles.
I’m not kicking myself in the crotch for being astronomically handicapped, or patting myself on the back for having had some success with the writing. It is what it is. I type or read and I hear an echo; it’s like I throw a ball and the ball bounces back from the ether, as if there were a wall out there rather than infinite blackness.
But if I go in the backyard right now and want to admire the details of Ursa Minor, the night might end with a broken telescope.
That’s better than what happens, though, to guys in Conor McGregor’s field who get into the octagon when they have no business being there. In there, limbs get twisted, ears pulped to weird cauliflower shapes, noses broken so flat that formerly handsome men look like surly bulls.
Conor himself has had his ass kicked many a time, so maybe he’s not as talented as he thinks he is?
Just don’t tell him I said so. I suck at fighting almost as much as I suck at astronomy.