I have written a response here.

Nate—

Did you read His Dark Materials, the trilogy by Philip Pullman ostensibly aimed at children?

Through much of the trilogy, the main character has relied on her intuitive ability to read the Compass, an instrument that scholars in her world labored lifetimes to interpret at even the most superficial level. At the end of the final book her ability disappears. It is explained to her that, essentially, her talent was a gift of childhood that she must shed as she becomes a young woman; however, through diligence, study, and practice, she may be able to use the compass again as adults do.

While many of the things that happen in the third book make me stabby with rage, that part just blows my mind with its insight into growing up.

Erika: thanks for the thoughtful response. I left a comment over at your blog.

Megan: I remember that part of The Amber Spyglass vividly, actually, and appreciate having it recalled to my attention in light of what I just wrote. I remember being kind of angry when I read it, actually: having Lyra’s ability to read the alethiometer explained away as something not related to her personal greatness bothered me. That reaction may have been rather telling, now that I reflect on it.

Much of that book made me mad, too, but I’m pretty tempted to reread the series: I think I was rather inflexible in a lot of ways in dealing with Pullman’s ideas. He doesn’t understand what Christianity is because that’s not how I see Christianity. I wonder if there’s more there than I was able to see at first, as with your example of the alethiometer.

Yeah, it was hard for me to separate legitimate objections to His Dark Materials from my visceral resentment of his criticism of Christianity. I felt more justified after reading some British critics, who come from a much more secular culture than mine and called Pullman out for some of the things I noticed. I think where Pullman fails, as a writer and as a critic of institutionalized religion, is in the single-dimensionality of his characterization of the Church. In his view, the Church has no redeeming value whatsoever and all its representatives are evil. The starkness of this portrayal undermines his credibility.

Nb: isn’t it hilarious that the Christian far right wasted all that effort denouncing the Harry Potter series and ignored these genuinely subversive books?

I won’t take for granted your feelings about the author who provoked HB’s previous post (I find Gladwell both frequently compelling and insightful and also too simplifying and easy to dislike) but he has a book called Outliers, which I have not really read but briefly skimmed, in which he attempts to explain why some people are very successful and some are not. Having not really read the book I don’t know whether he goes so far as this, but I have seen some folks point to his book in (perhaps too extreme, in my view) arguments that natural talent does not really exist in any meaningful way. One factoid the book does discuss and which was reported fairly widely is the claim that everyone who becomes exceptionally great in any field—whether basketball, chess, violin, computer programming—spends at least 10,000 hours at the task before reaching such remarkable levels of success, that even so-called “child prodigies” put in comparable numbers of hours and only did so much younger.

(He also discusses circumstantial and social/cultural influences on success—things you might call luck—which in my skimming I found more interesting.)

I think an awful lot of people are basically uninterested in self-improvement. I found, trying to teach literature (and literacy) to high school kids, that any glimmer of self-cultivation—playing an instrument, physical fitness, anything at all—was a great sign and a great starting point for cultivation elsewhere. It was not always easy to find, however.

Some reactions:

Adolescence, I think, fooled me: I woke up one morning and discovered that I was stronger, taller, better looking, and more confident.

This didn’t happen to me.

There’s a lot of good thoughts in this essay. I didn’t know you were studying martial arts!

I think one can make the “talent doesn’t matter/exist” point in some areas better than others. Robbie, I’ve heard the 10,000 hours figure before too, and there’s a general rough plausibility to it. Recently I read a book by a polyglot explaining how she learns languages, and she claimed that there was no such thing as unusual linguistic ability, that success in language acquisition simply=motivation+effort+time.

On the other hand, to say that I could become as good at basketball as Michael Jordan [sorry I’m so out of touch, I don’t know a more contemporary player] if only I gave it 10,000 hours is just false. I’m too short and that’s that. I can’t become a world-class tenor if my voice is bass. If I have skinny little hands I’ll have a lot more trouble being a virtuoso pianist than someone with an unusually wide handspan.

And it’s not just physical limitations. Anecdotal evidence I’ve read suggests that many math prodigies are just born that way. You can’t become a math prodigy through practice.

In many areas people may end up stymied through lack of access to a decent teacher. I read somewhere a classics professor opining that only around 2% of people trying to learn classical Greek on their own succeed. People need teachers. Part of the reason for the failure, no doubt, is the failure of motivation and sustained effort, but a lot of it, surely, is that Greek is a hard language, and learning a language from books is hard, making it a daunting task without guidance. It’s not necessarily about not putting in the time to drill paradigms so much as the difficulty of absorbing an alien idiom without a mind that already knows it present (no movies, tv, audiobooks, etc. either!). (In my own experience self-studying Greek and Latin is much harder and progress is much slower than self-studying French, German, or Anglo-Saxon.)

That said, in general I agree that in most areas most people fail to be excellent by a lack of effort and sustained concentration rather than through a lack of innate specialness. Whatever difficulties a given goal presents, one is likely to give up in frustration or laziness before truly reaching one’s intrinsic limits.

Robbie: Prior to hb’s post, the 10,000 hour theory was my sole association with Gladwell. I haven’t read any of Gladwell’s actual writing and have only been told about the rough outlines by others. These rough outlines strike me as highly plausible. They certainly fit with what I know about certain great artists like Michaelangelo, who would spend fourteen hours a day working.

As to self-improvement, I think it gets a bad rap: the very name is associated in my mind with Oprah-style self-help books or “learn programming in 24 hours”-style Bookstore fodder. A certain amount of redemption of the concept may be necessary, at least for people like me. A friend suggested me over lunch last week that a book with the title “How to Learn Programming Over the Next Ten Years and Have Fun Along the Way” would really be his ideal.

Michael: I think natural proclivities like the ones you describe are undeniably real. I suspect, though, that we may care about them far more than is good for us. The basic physical capabilities that separate you and Michael Jordan are the sort of thing that professional sports are all about — what separates the best from the best? But isn’t that a strange way to focus on human greatness? You, shorter than Jordan though you may be, are certainly capable of becoming a great basketball player in what I would call the broader and more interesting sense. You could become a master in the sport, able to dribble like the ball were an extension of your body and shoot like the ball had nowhere to go but that hoop. That would be, of course, no guarantee that someone of comparable skill couldn’t beat you because of some of those basic physical attributes. But why should we be so concerned about that? Isn’t it more interesting that you became truly good at something?

We have a fascination with the prodigy, and maybe that’s not entirely bad. But I do think it’s an excuse, sometimes, to abandon the rich and far more normative arena of mastery. And, now that I’ve articulated it, I think this has a lot to do with my dislike of professional sports.

As to teachers: I suspect you have a really, really good point there. The very concept of self-improvement without a teacher may be a response to something that’s already broken. I think part of what I’m looking for in life right now is someone who can teach me the Art of Practice — especially in drawing, frankly. But most teaching seems focused on the skills or techniques themselves… the teachers then just say, “Now go practice!” as if the hows of that were perfectly obvious. I suspect that much teaching would benefit from diminished emphasis on concepts, techniques, and subject matter and increased emphasis on teaching how to become a practicer of the subject involved.

As far as the talent thing goes, I agree with Michael that people have limitations. As a kid I did figure skating for a while. I was really bad at it. That is to say, people who started later than I did quickly surpassed me, and learned more easily. Still I put a lot of time and effort into it and did make progress, only at a somewhat slower rate than my peers. For a human being I’m a pretty good skater now, I can still skate smoothly and fast and do some jumps and spins, which people who haven’t had figure skating training can’t do.

I do think there is value to learning skills like that, in places where one is not particularly talented, but not ineducable either. And ice skating really is fun. But the way some people (including my coaches) saw figure skating, there wasn’t much point putting a lot of effort into training someone like me. I was never going to win competitions, I was not material for the Olympics or even the local synchronized skating team. It depends on your goals. If there is a time-limited competition to gain a certain level of skill (most skaters leave the sport by age 15), even a small edge in talent (where talent is rate of learning) can be decisive. Fortunately most areas of human endeavor aren’t as hypercompetitive as figure skating, and in many cases people doing something at a less-than-world-class skill level are still valuable, and usually there is not so much time pressure. Programming, for instance.

We have a fascination with the prodigy, and maybe that’s not entirely bad. But I do think it’s an excuse, sometimes, to abandon the rich and far more normative arena of mastery. And, now that I’ve articulated it, I think this has a lot to do with my dislike of professional sports.

I agree with this completely. It also seems to be related to things I agree with in Erica’s post: certain things aren’t worth becoming really good at without the natural gifts necessary for true greatness. I can’t imagine, for instance, being one of those chess professionals who studies for a lifetime, scraping by in the rankings, only to be beaten over and over by the prodigies. Better to be an enthusiastic amateur and have a life outside chess. On the other hand, I believe some things are really worth whatever time is put into them, and whatever one’s natural aptitudes are. What those things are though would probably be controversial.

I can’t imagine, for instance, being one of those chess professionals who studies for a lifetime, scraping by in the rankings, only to be beaten over and over by the prodigies.

What I’m particularly curious about (and don’t pretend to any confident knowledge about) is whether the most important difference between that guy and the prodigies is in their different genetic inheritances or, on the other hand, something in either the quantity or quality of their practice. Because it does often seem that at least one of the striking advantages of the “prodigy” is an obsessive zeal.

And even in the case of those “naturally” better figure skaters, I wonder if they hadn’t been putting in many more (or somehow better?) hours at a much younger age at non-skating activities that developed their balance or coordination or some other edge-giving but not necessarily innate ability.

I too have made several replies to this and Erika’s post here.

Nate: Adolescence, I think, fooled me: I woke up one morning and discovered that I was stronger, taller, better looking, and more confident. I think I was probably some interesting ratio between you and Michael on this one. I certainly benefited from circumstance, though: I became a member of the cool people in eighth grade (after decidedly not being one the previous year) when I was selected for the five-member algebra section of the class. How unlikely is that? I guess it pays to grow up in a place full of people convinced that a college education is the only means to a good life. In any case, I was totally fooled by this selection into working my ass off in algebra, since I in no way felt I was smart enough to manage the harder work (and indeed, was always second-best to another kid). I never really realized how much I worked at it till now, though—thanks for the useful memory. Also, congrats on the flossing. Well do I remember being pretty proud of telling you and KJ how I’d successfully given up nail-biting for the fourth time in my life. Once again, it hasn’t lasted.

Robbie: My own familiarity with Gladwell, before that article, was limited to the recommendation that Outliers was a useful read. I still intend to look at it relatively soon, and am encouraged in that intention by your fair-sounding critique of him.

I wonder how much of that apparent lack of desire for self-cultivation comes from things like ambition and curiosity being beaten down or not rewarded. I suppose in any human soul, something like laziness has to come into play, but I want to hold out for, perhaps naively, the idea that those without visible sparks weren’t always that way. That’s probably true, though, without revealing much of anything about education.

All: One thing I suspect about those things that aren’t really worth mastering, except perhaps for prodigies or (perhaps) professionals, is that the acts of learning them may habituate us in how to practice. Certainly that’s a common apology for teaching children sports. The sad truth, however, is that I’m without hobbies and never played sports except with friends, so I can’t report this suspicion with any confidence.

Nate: I think natural proclivities like the ones you describe are undeniably real. I suspect, though, that we may care about them far more than is good for us. Certainly we are obsessed with figuring out our base material - our gifts, our talents, Part of the root of that obsession, I think, is the disturbingly equipotential character of the future that faces us as wealthy educated Americans. We’re not going to be farmers because that’s the only thing anyone in the village becomes, shoemakers because our fathers were shoemakers, wives because we’re women. So how are we then to avoid shame in the eyes of others and frustration in our own eyes?

Erika: A beautiful description on your blog! One of the distinctions between childhood and adulthood may be that, in childhood, given one’s liberty, one will practice at the things one loves. There’s no idea of a goal - as a child I didn’t write to become a better writer, I wrote because it made me happy to write. Also, as a child, doing things imperfectly entails less shame - ‘good for your age’ is still accepted as praise.

hb: Anna was just asking whether you still bit your nails, after noticing the gnawed state of my own fingers. Curiously enough, in light of this discussion, another friend just up and stopped, without effort, without resolution, without practice. “I guess this means I’m grown up!” she said.

Megan: Pullman has a magnificent fantastical imagination, and seems to me to be struggling against it every step of the way. I have a theory that evangelical secularism is inimical to fantasy, but that’s hardly germane to the discussion at hand. So finally:

Nate Again: I suspect that much teaching would benefit from diminished emphasis on concepts, techniques, and subject matter and increased emphasis on teaching how to become a practicer of the subject involved. But is there a how to practicing? If so, how does it differ from “Just go home and try it over and over again?” I too have felt the difficulty of self-improvement without a teacher - at least in my adult life - but I wonder what the role of such a teacher would be. To identify for me the areas in which I needed practice? To prescribe methods of practice for me? To provide that which no internet quiz can: some external person whom I have a stake in not disappointing?

What I’m particularly curious about (and don’t pretend to any confident knowledge about) is whether the most important difference between that guy and the prodigies is in their different genetic inheritances or, on the other hand, something in either the quantity or quality of their practice.

I don’t know about chess, but when it comes to its oriental analogue, go, the problem confronting the brilliant workhorse player may simply be that one’s prodigy opponent is being secretly coached by the spirit of a medieval go master inhabiting his grandfather’s board. So at least I am led to believe by the awesome manga Hikaru No Go. Ghosts might also be coaching you if your avocation is golf or the use of The Force to destroy Death Stars, if I recall correctly.

Michael:That is a beautiful, and importantly common, image of talent. Pullman probably links talent too much with the ordered progression of age, but Megan alluded to something in the same genus as a grandfather’s ghost when a girl has to leave behind a source of skills or ability that turns out not to be, or even be of, her (or at least her permanent, non-child self). In this image, talent appears outside of one, as another quasi-soul, in fact, with its own source of motion and rest, its own tastes and points it’s trying to make. I think the image is probably pointing not to the substance it’s embodying (or enspiriting), but to the posture of a human who can, or is forced to, be quiet and listen to something other than “himself” before he can do something well. That’s why The Force seemed exciting and desirable: Obi-Wan and gradually Luke can become powerful by letting go, thereby connecting themselves directly to objects and minds outside of themselves. (I mean, to the Kantian, telekinesis has to be the most impossible sort of interaction of the mind with the outside world.) The fact that the imaginatively bankrupt Lucas spelled out the mundane details of the myth with his particles is annoying for its pseudo-scientific specificity, but it’s pretty much analogous to the ghosts, and thus doesn’t really destroy the import of The Force as an image.

I guess I’m arguing that not only does talent not exist, even our common images of it are really attempts to talk about what successful human beings do when they’re successful.

Professional sports are, at best, a mixture of good and bad elements. I just came across a rather long article about a 16 year-old who may well be drafted into professional baseball next year. He’s a once-in-a-generation player, according to the hype, although he plays like an player from earlier generations. He will likely get about $25-30 million in a year from now, barring injury. Blah blah blah. What’s interesting about him is how he got that way.

“He’s the real deal. You know why? It’s like he doesn’t take the game and the gift that he has for granted. He’s maximizing everything. You’re not worried about him going out there and living on talent alone. He’s working hard. He’s playing hard. He has a maturity about him, a toughness that says he’s going to work his butt off. It’s really refreshing to see these kinds of skills and talent, and the work ethic and dedication to go with it.”

Bryce Harper was playing T-ball at age three against six-year-olds, partly to be with his older brother, Bryan, who was drafted by the Nationals in the 31st round last year but elected to attend Cal State—Northridge. By the time Bryce was nine, travel teams from California to Colorado to Oklahoma were calling the Harpers and offering to put their son on a plane, lodge him in a hotel and provide his meals so he could play for them in tournaments. A travel player for hire.

Nearly every chance they could, the Harpers had Bryce play against kids two or three years older than he was. “I love playing against the older guys,” Bryce says, “because I love showing up the older guys.”

After trying to sort through the bluster and worship of sports journalism, I still interpret these reports as telling us that this kid worked really, really hard. It’s true that he’s a big 16 year-old at 6’3”, 205, but that’s not really that exceptional. It’s possible that he’s got some physical gift, but swinging a baseball bat to hit a pitch is such a complex motion, integrating so many body parts, that I don’t think physical gifts are enough to account for something like this. It’ll be interesting to see how well he handles Major League pitching. When it comes to taking on older guys who’ve been working at something for longer than he has, though, he’s had a lot of practice.

You’ll have to read the whole article to get clues on what all of this has done to his soul.

Thanks Nate! You have no idea how much this helps me!

I once took a class in creativity. I realize how crazy that sounds, a “class” in “creativity” — how eye-rollingly liberal artsy (Yes, I took it only because basket-weaving did not fit my schedule). Anyway, the class was not entirely without merit. The main take-away was that whatever your field of endeavor, you must make it a practice. You must do it every day, even if you don’t get the desired results of a masterpiece every time. Well, I certainly have a long way to go to re-incorporate these principles in my day-to-day… but it’s good to get a reminder once and awhile.

You should ‘Let My People Go Surfing’. Aside from being a generally interesting book, the author lays out a theory regarding what he calls ‘eighty-percenters’. In brief, his belief is that most people are only willing to commit what is require to reach the 80th percentile (not that they will necessarily get there, of course), but the true greats are willing to give the disproportionately huge amount of effort needed to approach 100%. Steve Vai, probably the most technically proficient rock guitarist ever, practiced 10 hours a day, every day, minimum, for years. Being the best means giving up everything else.

Posting from work sucks: that should say, ‘You should read…’

I think in cases of learning, the perfect is the enemy of the good. To strive for perfection in all you do is, for most, damaging to the motivation. To reach 80% of your total potential in, say, learning guitar is going to make you a pretty competent guitarist with endless personal rewards.

“In this image, talent appears outside of one, as another quasi-soul, in fact, with its own source of motion and rest, its own tastes and points it’s trying to make.”…”I guess I’m arguing that not only does talent not exist, even our common images of it are really attempts to talk about what successful human beings do when they’re successful.”

This image of talent would have once been called tradition, or God, or both, or some other term emerging from these. And these images remain very important on a mythical level. We can no longer be in awe of the gods, or God, in any direct sense: nature and human abilities are essentially what we have left to marvel at. But even if God is dead in many ways, residues of the old cosmos remain indirectly very powerful in the imagination: it remains a pervasive understanding, deeply appealing and convincing on a gut level to countless, to see human greatness as having some transcendent source, and one whose emergence occurs along no rational or just plan: a cosmically unfair distribution, but a marvellous one. But then it’s also a wonderfully American idea to suggest that talent is “bullshit,” that hard work is the path to accomplishment, and so on—in other words, that greatness does not emerge from anything that could be termed a gift. There’s obviously a tension here. Do we want an enchanted world or a democratic one? Or can we have a postmodern science that gives us both? The reconciliation would make what replaces the in-between and incoherent notion of “talent” both more authentically ‘inside’ (i.e. agency-centered) and more ‘outside’ (but in a secular-mystical sort of way).This is the general shape, I gather, of a lot of contemporary liberatory strategies—this for example.

I need to do a better job of responding to all comments left here. My problem is that a certain mass of interesting things gets said and I have a strong emotional desire not to fuck things up. But I neglect the possibility of a lot of good conversations.

Katherine: You wrote: “But is there a how to practicing? If so, how does it differ from ‘Just go home and try it over and over again?’”

I think there is a how to practicing, but I think it may be as varied and particulars as the great sea of human endeavor. One of the joys of my adult life, actually, has been discovering what intense pleasure there is to be had in little bits of how to practice.

An example: on a design blog, I once read a bit of advice about observing and using other design concepts. Stop looking so much at the wholes, it suggested; stop taking screenshots of whole pages and dropping it in your morgue file to use as inspiration. Whole pages are actually gigantic, complex compositions, and attempting to use these as inspiration can frequently turn into less productive imitation. Instead, capture the little bits of pages. Grab corners, edges, bullets, text flourishes, lines… get in much closer than you’re used to. Preserving these things helps narrow our focus to the tools that a person is using rather than the effect that they achieve, and helps us develop a similarly versatile toolbox rather than focus on somehow becoming a similar designer.

That’s a how, a method of observation and collection that constitutes a kind of practice in one discipline with which I am more familiar.

Dan: I think you’re exactly right about what it takes to be the best, but suspect there’s a contradiction in what you say about the 80th percentile. If “most people” were content to reach only that, wouldn’t the 80th percentile keep climbing into infinity? To my mind, being in the 80th percentile of a craft is more interesting and more rewarding than our culture admits. I think Kevin captures this very well when he says that an 80th-percentile guitar player has “endless personal rewards”.

Guitar is one of the few things that tend to be universally granted this kind of legitimacy: almost everyone admits that playing a guitar is interesting, fun, and worthwhile pretty much from the beginning. If only we were as quick to grant such legitimacy to the joys of drawing, singing, or any of the other things that get pushed away from amateurs toward the artisans.

Adrian: Thank you for saying so!

Aimee: Frankly, it sounds as if your class in creativity, as silly a concept as that might be in the wrong hands, was grounded in very useful practical wisdom.

J-drama: You wrote: “But then it’s also a wonderfully American idea to suggest that talent is “bullshit,” that hard work is the path to accomplishment, and so on—in other words, that greatness does not emerge from anything that could be termed a gift.”

There would certainly be a kind of blasphemy in the attempt to banish gratitude from human endeavor. I’m interested in a kind of universalization of the gift of inspiration, a gift which is frequently reserved for those with talent. I suggest that inspiration, the lightning strike of divinity, is vastly more available than we realize. That it surrounds us like a cloud, ready to have us open our eyes and reach out into it, ready to be witnessed and seized and bound together with almost anything we wish. I like to imagine the gods watching us above, minds boggling at how we curse our lack of talent while they pour rivers of down on an inspiration-saturated earth.

J-Drama: I’m conscious of being a little blasphemous myself, but I hope my punishment isn’t too severe, in light of my praise of these images at the expense of the generic “talent.” I wouldn’t want to banish the mythical images (or their poets) from our company, since I think that in showing us what successful people do (e.g. become quiet, be persistent, “feel the Force flow through [them]”) they’re very useful. Not only that, they’re often better at describing the habits of success than prose: poetry really is a gift of the gods because poets really don’t understand their works. So, I’ll take the critique about these accounts being powerful and pervasive, since I went a little too far in saying “doesn’t exist.” Like Nate, I historically tend to err on the other extreme when crediting successes.

I’m not sure I’d be ready to call the non-mythical account democratic, although I certainly see how it can be an ally of democracy. But if we really want the best to become manifest (and perhaps to rule), it seems to me quite likely that the account that doesn’t stunt natural aptitude by denying the importance of practice would be the one we’d want to use, not to mention being the truer one. That is, it’s not clear to me that this account is in itself democratic, even though it might be well expressed, as a corrective, in those terms:

You guys have it real easy. I never had it like this where I grew up. But I send my kids here because the fact is you go to one of the best schools in the country: Rushmore. Now, for some of you it doesn’t matter. You were born rich and you’re going to stay rich. But here’s my advice to the rest of you: Take dead aim on the rich boys. Get them in the crosshairs and take them down. Just remember, they can buy anything but they can’t buy backbone. Don’t let them forget it. Thank you.

Being labeled as a prodigy can be rather damning at times. When I was in fourth or fifth grade and very few people expected that I would still be living at the age I’ve reached, one of my teachers told my mother that I was a late bloomer but that I would immediately excel at writing sometime in the future. She was right. From my very first poem in poetry workshop, I was told that I had already found my “voice” as a poet and knew precisely how to evoke certain reactions in readers.

But my “sudden” success with writing was not sudden at all. It had little to do with having found an actual voice or being a practiced writer. It had to do with being a practiced observer—someone who studied other writing and studied other people. I did not have a voice or a solid sense of self, I just knew how to make it seem like I did.

As someone dealing with extreme illness from such an early age, I had very little, if any, power or control. Growing up in a society where we value control and bullshit like being “master of my own destiny” so ridiculously highly, it became very important to be powerful in whatever ways I could. I was shy, inarticulate, almost always behind academically, and terrible at almost everything requiring any kind of physical skill or agility. What I mastered were the arts of waiting and watching.

By observing others, I absorbed so much. It was not long before I became adept at manipulating people because I knew exactly what to say or do—whether it was what they wanted most or what would hurt them most (though there isn’t always a difference.) When I began really trying to write, it was not easy, just as manipulating people wasn’t easy. But I knew how to make it seem natural from the first time I really tried. Yes, I’ve gotten better at writing by doing it a great deal since then. But I still spend a lot more time thinking about the poems—letting images drift and emotions foment and sensations take shape—than I spend actually writing. HB, you suggest that poetry can be a kind of mythic force. Have I written poems that seemed to come out of nowhere, that came out perfectly the first time? Sure. But they’re not mythic, they’re not magic, and they’re not some god-given gift. They’re just poems that have been writing themselves in my subconscious for quite some time. And as pretentious and mysterious as some poets would prefer to be, I don’t think any poetry comes from something or somewhere other than the poet. These poems can surprise readers and even the poet, but they come into being courtesy of a kind of heightened awareness of the world around and within us.

Is this talent? Is this practice? When I would manipulate people (I should, but won’t, stop phrasing this as though I am not still guilty of this), it was often an effort to be less lonely. Whether I was getting so close to someone that I could treat them as badly as I felt life or some higher power treated me, or learning enough about someone to figure out what ways I could behave to please and satisfy them, my malleability with others tended to leave me feeling far more contemptible and alone than solitude ever could. I wonder whether having relegated so many of these self-destructive tendencies to the art of writing is actually somehow better for myself and others. After bending myself and finding success with some writing task, I often feel the same kind of emptiness I felt when trying to lose myself and manipulate others more directly. I’ve written a poem: I’ve stripped away some layer, some small fragment, some possibility of who I was or am or might be. But too often, others suppose that these poems are some kind of emotionally accurate and meaningful reflection of myself and my experiences. Are they foolish or just fooled for being won over by my words? And why would anyone but a fool want to work so hard at an art that essentially consists of deception?

Drawing and sports and just about any art surely also benefit from a kind of life-long dedication to observation (as you’ve noted, Nate, about web design), to varying degrees. But how many people are disinterested enough in themselves and their own methods and preferences to actually cultivate this sort of observation? And how many people are interesting enough that their endless reflections will persist in seeming like art?

On a few occasions I have wondered whether some people who discount talent (or innate ability, or whatever) don’t do so out of vanity— as if to say in their own defense, when faced with one or another inferiority, Well I could do that too if I cared enough to dedicate so much time to it.

Robbie: That’s certainly an account I’ve heard before. I don’t think I’m sharing its error, though. It in no way absolves my failures to say that others, more successful than I am, in fact worked harder than I did. If anything, it magnifies my culpability and deflates even further my vanity.

To clarify: The ‘eighty-percenter’ doesn’t necessarily achieve the 80th percentile. In the book, it is a way of describing what the author considers a common approach to all manner of activities. Indeed, he characterizes himself as an ‘eighty-percenter’. It is a mentality more than anything: Steve Vai, if born without a left hand, could still be a one-hundred-percenter in regards to guitar, though he almost certainly would never reach anywhere near the skill level he has with both hands intact.

More directly to your point, having most people approach the LSAT with the attitude of an eighty-percenter doesn’t necessarily move the 80th percentile upwards. Indeed, probably no one sits for the LSAT and thinks, ‘50th percentile is good enough for me!’ The reality is that the pool of test takers is probably comprised of a small number who have prepared little, a small number who have been obsessive, and a vast group who have prepared as though the test is important, but only one of many pursuits that occupy their time and energy. This latter group is comprised of eighty-percenters. Many of them probably hope for the 90th percentile (or higher), but they were not willing to prepare like someone who has a one-hundred-percenter mentality.

And, obviously, mentality isn’t everything. Many people sat for the same LSAT I did. The reality, of course, is that, with moderate effort, I scored 99.8th percentile, while many of those who worked much harder scored far lower. I’m better at the things measured by the LSAT than one would expect based solely upon my preparation. Yet, by the same token, I spent many years obsessively focused on music, but, among other things, a lack of natural aptitude means that my life will be spent in front of an Excel spreadsheet, not a crowd of 10,000 screaming fans. I am only as good at music as my level of preparation.