Comment by tianqi
1 day ago
One of my thoughts is that it's not easy for people to discover what they're truly good at.
The reason is that if you're truly good at something, if you have a real talent for it, then it's easy for you to do it well from the start, so you rarely judge it or realize how good you are. Just as no one thinks they're good at their heartbeat and breathing. Because you have the talent to be good at them from the beginning, so you don't put in much effort to learn them, and therefore you don't realize how difficult they are.
I think a real way to discover your strengths is not to reflect on what you do well, but on what makes you most frustrated when you see others doing it. It feels like an experienced driver watching a student drive and getting frustrated: Why can't you do such a simple action correctly? If you find yourself constantly wondering on something: why can't everyone just do this and it's so simple? You can remind yourself that that one might not be simple at all, but rather that you possess a genuine talent for it.
>>The reason is that if you're truly good at something, if you have a real talent for it, then it's easy for you to do it well from the start, so you rarely judge it or realize how good you are.
I've often wondered about this (beyond basic abilities). I'm sure there are exceptional people for whom this is true but in my experience most people start out not being very good at what they later end up being really good at.
Would love to know if there's some sort of data / research on this.
Most things take learning to master. But most people have more of an aptitude for some things than others and find it comparatively easy to become baseline competent at those things.
Like, one of my nephews could dribble a soccer ball almost as soon as he could walk — it was astonishing how good he was at it at 20 months old. At three his ball control skills were as good as his father’s were at 9 or so (a father who was good enough to play in travel leagues in middle school, so no slouch).
No, at age 5, of course he can’t compete with adults who play in rec leagues. He doesn’t have the speed, strength, situational awareness, reflexes, or sense of of his options in a given situation.
But on the other hand, in isolation, he can almost always get the ball to go where he wants it. He’ll never in his life feel like that’s a skill he had to _learn_.
Whereas I’ve never been able to pick up dribbling at all regardless of how many hours of practice they subjected us to in phys ed.
I think we have so many hangups about this subject that we ended up leaving it unexplored and misunderstood.
Talent, drive, inherent traits interacting with learnable traits, learning curves, etc. What you are good at. What you are good at getting better at.
"Blank slate" is a better ethic. It's sort of the basis for modern public/political moral perspectives. But also for personal ethos... the "growth mindset* is a much better ethos and mentality.
But Otoh... we are who we are. We have the body we have. The genes we have. The childhood development we have. The education and experience we have. The personality we have. Etc.
We don't really have the have the culture of weighing these, and "knowing ourselves" via a mattwr-of-fact, calculating examination.
Sorry to sort of hijack your comment, but as I was reading it I was instantly reminded of a "blog post" that I have in my list of "blog posts for the blog I don't have, and which I will likely never actually share with the world", and thought "Why not share this one today?"
As a prelude, I resonate somewhat with your approach to finding what we're good at. I don't look at how good we are at something, but more at a sort of quality of "effortlessness". Though, now that I am re-reading the pseudo-blog-post (it's from more than a year ago), I am not convinced this is the best word, as it sort of...makes it seem like people didn't put in work!
Anyway, my opinion:
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I recently caught myself thinking about how different people do and feel about certain kinds of work in different ways.
I think we often tend to think in two axes. We think about liking to do something and not liking — which is one axis (our enjoyment). And there’s also the axis of being bad or good at it, which is the axis of quality.
It seems to me that we think about work according to these two axes. However, I don't think this is the full picture. By which I mean that I think it's possible for you to like something, and for you to be able to be good at something (i.e. to produce good, even incredible quality work), while still having a third axis tied to this equation.
The Effort Axis.
The third axis, to me is, is the effort axis. We can be good at something and enjoy it, but it can still take us a lot of effort. People kind of think about passion, or being "born to do something" (some say it's a "calling"). I think that when you have a calling, you are deep into the third axis, and it is very likely you are also deep into the other axes.
The third axis essentially means that things should feel effortless.
You can be very good at something, but it can still take a while for you to produce good results. And especially if it doesn't feel effortless, it often means that you'll procrastinate more, and that you'll delay it. That it’ll weigh heavier on your mind. But if it feels effortless, you just want more and more and more of it.
This thought came to me when I thought about working on breaking down a project into user stories and, most of all, adding them and meticulously creating them in the appropriate task management software. This is something that I enjoy a lot. It's something that I actually believe I can produce quality results in. And if I really put my mind into it, I can actually do it fast.
But it doesn't feel effortless.
When I finalize it, I feel very drained. Again, I can feel that I've made good progress, that I've produced something very good, and I can genuinely think, "Yeah, I really liked doing this", but I feel very tired. Whereas I think I can code very effortlessly. I think I can effortlessly devise very complex solutions, or very simple solutions for complex problems. And I think it's clearly my "calling".
Today a colleague had the responsibility of handling this process of creating tasks and everything else. And I was marveled at how effortlessly he was doing it all. It's not that he has a lot of experience, or that his results were outrageously good (they were good, but not remarkable). It's just that it clearly felt effortless to him. And I thought: Now, this is something that we should focus this person on.
It's actually the first time they've done it. We gave him the challenge, like we have given other people, and it was amazing. It felt great to work with someone who was able to do things effortlessly.
People often say that you should surround yourself with the best quality workers, the ones who produce incredible results, the ones that have passion. Let's be clear: I have passion about working on those user stories, but it's not effortless.
So I think that you should actually surround yourself with people for whom the work feels effortless.
And at times, it may actually not be the best quality work, but it’ll drive them. They will have more energy. And you will marvel at the way in which it was not a problem for them. They looked at it, they started attacking the problem, and they imbued this wave of positivity — this unshakable belief that they were going to do it.
Even if the results weren't the best, you can feel that they will iterate over it, and they will do it quickly enough and with enough quality because it is effortless for them.
Do not underestimate the power of doing something effortlessly.
Hey this really resonates. I’ve been looking for a way to describe the observation that talent is multi-dimensional without using that word, or just saying something generic like “people are good at different things.”
Maybe you should write some blog posts after all.
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