So I was reading this blog post somewhere today about a book called “talent is overrated.” I was in immediate agreement with this pithy little phrase… it always bothered me when people would refer to my pro bass playing as a result of my “being so talented.” “Talent” had little or nothing to do with it– as this blog I read today pointed out, it’s really about consistent practice and determination.
But in my typical skeptical mind set, I started to ask myself if that was the end of it. Determination and persistence is wonderful, but I have, sadly, noticed that for some people that doesn’t work either. So I am left to wonder if perhaps there isn’t yet another element to be considered in the mix.
While determination and persistent effort is of course terribly important, there is another element that doesn’t get mentioned. And that is, not only what you learn about “what works,” but also what you learn about what doesn’t work. Relentless experimentation is very much of a learning process about what you may have been told will work and discovering that it really doesn’t. Only by relentless first-hand experimentation can you get yourself free of the misinformation.
A perfect example/illustration of this is the Wright brothers. When they started building their first gliders, they bought various scientific books about airfoils and started building their gliders to those specifications. They had numerous initial failures, and they should have decided that they were lousy glider builders and given up, but instead, they kept going. And one of the most important things that they discovered was, many of the equations and theories in these books about flight dynamics were either incomplete or completely incorrect. If they had merely persisted in following the preset instructions found in the books on the topic, they never would’ve gotten off the ground.
One of the great secrets of the whole process of dogged determination is not so much that persistent obedience by itself will yield results. There is another element, which is, once you experience a certain number of failures, and once you have tried the standard methods and failed enough times, out of sheer anger and frustration, you will do something that is normally very unnatural: you’ll completely depart from the conventional wisdom and you will become completely open-minded to any new idea.
The establishment of being open to totally new ideas is a byproduct of practicing or working yourself nearly to death and to levels of exhaustion. It is a pity that we have to work so hard just to get back to a state of total open mindedness that we had when we were 2 years old.
Again, this success can be achieved much more easily through the use of the principles of applied stupidity. There is so much misinformation out there about just about any endeavor you care to take on… and we grab it because it always offers easy money or a quick and easy result. And you have the power to simply switch it off, forget it, and/or ignore it.
So just a reminder, whoever you are, wherever you are, you have something to offer her that no one else has. The whole dogged persistence process is probably a necessary prerequisite to bringing that out, as you have probably been subjected to tremendous suppression of your unique self. But I would just like to say, that’s not all there is to it. There’s no harm in reinventing the wheel when it leads to your discovering so much knowledge about wheels that it enables you to invent a whole new mode of transportation.
