We want to believe in talent. As Jean-Paul Sartre put it, “What people would like is that a coward or a hero be born that way.”, knowing that it protects us by degrading the very achievements that it pretends to elevate; magically separating us from those that are great athletes, ensuring that we are incompatible with them; and relieving those of us who are not excellent of responsibility for our own condition. “To call someone ‘divine’” Friedrich Nietzche once wrote, “means ‘Here we do not have to compete.’” In the mystified notion of talent, the unanalyzed pseudo-explanation of outstanding performance, we codify our own deep psychological resistance to the simple reality of the world, to the overwhelming mundanity of excellence.
Daniel Chambliss, The Mundanity Of Excellence
Excellence, Chambliss shows us in his study of great swimmers, does not arise from talent — usually discovered only after athletes begin to win regularly — nor from hard work, as he found by comparing the routines of the great and not-so-great. Excellence comes from deliberate practice:
the doing of actions, ordinary in themselves, performed consistently and carefully, habitualized, compounded together, added up over time. While these actions are “quantitatively different” from those of performers at other levels, these differences are neither unmanageable nor, taken one step at a time, terribly difficult.
Ignacy Paderewski, the musician, once said, ‘Before I was a genius, I was a drudge.’
So, be aware that ‘talent’ is an afterthought, and working ‘hard’ is optics. The tie that connects those involved in great work is their focus on their process, their obsession on deliberate practice: writing every morning before work, swimming the laps with the hands and feet just so, or playing the same concerto, very carefully but with brio, 100 times.
The most important takeaway is to work on your practice: it is a tool above all others, and one that we use to shape ourselves, a tiny bit every day.
(via stoweboyd)