I’ve recently been reading “Grit” by Angela Duckworth. I’m just shy of a third of the way through the book now and so far it’s been great. Duckworth discusses her journey in researching what causes people to push themselves to succeed in various life arenas and walks the reader through her discoveries. What has stood out to me so far is her struggles to understand “talent” and “effort” and how we view them as observers. 

Duckworth considers her experience as a teacher and noted that she gave more attention to students who appeared “talented” and excelled at learning math. She details an experience with a student who struggled with math but was turning in perfect work in which he was placed in “catch-up” classes due to poor performance in middle school. She advocated for him to be placed in the fast track classes, and eventually this student who was considered to not be talented in math became an aerospace engineer. A literal rocket scientist. 

The point was that Duckworth became interested in this idea of “talent.” She observed time and time again, both anecdotally and through research, that naturally talented individuals often performed worse than “strivers,” people who excel through sustained effort. She noticed that whenever people observed someone who was excelling in their respective field the people observing would assume that the person was naturally talented. She uses the example of the Olympics, we see the very best athletes of the world and assume they must be very talented. We don’t see the 4 years of constant training in between each of their displays. 

Natural Talent Protects Us From Our Flaws

One portion of the book that stuck out to me during this discussion on our obsession with talent was a writing by Nietzsche that Duckworth found while trying to understand this talent vs effort dynamic. 

“With everything perfect, we do not ask how it came to be. We rejoice in the present fact as though it came out of the ground by magic. No one can see in the work of the artist how it has become, that is its advantage. For wherever one can see the act of becoming one grows somewhat cool. 

Our vanity, our self-love, promotes the cult of the genius, for if we think of genius as something magical, we are not obliged to compare ourselves and find ourselves lacking… to call someone ‘divine’ means: ‘here there is no need to compete.”

Nietzsche is saying that we would rather assume someone is naturally talented because it allows us to ignore the fact that we probably COULD achieve something if we were willing to put in the time and effort. 

I see this all the time. One of my best friends is an artist, he works with 2d cartoons and animations. People would see him drawing in public and admire his “talent.” He always told them that he was not a naturally talented artist, he just put in the work to develop the skill. They never believed him when he said anyone could become an artist with enough practice. I knew for a fact that he was telling the truth because I remember very distinctly when he began drawing ALL THE TIME. We were in 11th grade and during our morning physics class he showed me his sketchbook. He had just started taking drawing more seriously. I watched the progression from sketches that weren’t bad all the way up to making fully animated high quality videos.

I’ve experienced this myself as well. In 11th grade (a very transformative year apparently) I learned to discount the myth of talent and began developing my theories or philosophies around effort being the key to success. I had always been interested in being able to play guitar so I joined the guitar class my high school offered. Throughout the entire year I slowly learned the principles of basic guitar playing, and to this day I still use the skills learned.

What once seemed impossible and out of reach became reality through the use of effort to engage in continuous practice. Despite no innate musical talent I was able to learn how to play a difficult instrument through effort alone. I have plenty more stories like this as well. 

Duckworth eventually takes this idea of effort being the key piece of success and creates a theory out of it. Her theory looked like this:

This theory struck me when I first read it. Duckworth claims talent is how quickly our skill progresses when effort is applied. In my music example above, this is certainly true. All of the musical genius in the family went to my younger brother, who was playing the lead piano part to “Come Sail Away” by Styx at age 9. He can still play it by the way. Under Duckworth’s model, my brother has more talent than I do at music and through his daily practice he built his skill faster than me. It takes me longer to acquire musical ability, so I have less talent. 

However, what stood out to me the most about this theory is that Effort gets applied twice in the equation. If you want to achieve something you need to use effort to build your skill. But then you need to use effort a second time to APPLY that skill. “Effort counts twice.” 

This leads me to a maxim that I created a few years ago; “Effort over Everything.” It’s the idea that through effort we can make up for most of the deficiencies we have in a particular area. It’s a simple concept, but for me it was incredibly formative. 

Ending the Myth of Talent

When I was growing up I had considerable talent (as described above) in school. I rarely struggled with any subject and getting good grades required minimal effort on my part. My parents constantly praised my “intelligence.” “You’re so smart, school will be so easy for you.” I was told that all my life. Up until 6th grade it was true. But as I progressed in school my innate talent became quickly outpaced by the increasing difficulty and workload of the material. If someone were to plot my grades throughout my entire school experience it would be a steady decline into mediocrity. 

This created a significant anxiety within me. I had been told all my life that I was intelligent, and yet my grades were saying that I was average at best. This created a low level resentment within me for school and people who succeeding. I looked around and saw all the people doing amazing things and wondered why I was suddenly struggling. This idea extended beyond just school, it bled into everything. 

Because I had been told my whole life that I was “intelligent” and everything would come so easy to me, I expected to be able to pick up anything with minimal effort. I assumed I would be able to learn any skill without the awkward failures and struggles. Whenever I tried anything and failed I would shy away from it to preserve my ego. I developed a severe perfectionism that hampered me from doing anything outside of my immediate comfort zone. 

One of the most formative moments of my life forced me to confront the myth of talent. I sprinted in track during high school, and focused on the 100 and 200 meter dashes. I had ran the 400 meter dash in middle school, but I hated it. It was exhausting, nerve-wracking, and miserable. In my first two years of high school track I avoided the 400. The 400 meter dash is 1 lap around an Olympic-style track, as fast as possible. You are sprinting for the entirety of the race. It’s brutal. I made excuses and rationalized staying comfortable because I had never learned the value of effort. 

During the first track meet of my junior year everything changed. I had ran the 100 meter and was getting ready to cheer my best friend on in the 400 meter. I positioned myself at the back curve, typically the most difficult part of the race to keep pace, so that I could encourage my friend while he ran.

 In track they typically call races 3 times prior to starting so that runners have time to prepare and make their way to the start line. I remember noticing that the final call had been made, and then the announcer called it again. And again. That was weird. Then I heard; “can Zach Alexander please come to the start line” over the loudspeakers. I grabbed my bag and jogged across the field. 

On the ground was my best friend, putting his spikes on, his signature shit-eating grin plastered on his face. I asked “what’s going on?” and he replied “Put your spikes on. You’re running.” I was stunned. “huh?” He said; “get your spikes on, we need a 5th runner or they have to cancel the race, you’re running.” So I sat down and put on my spikes.

At the time I had been living in fear and comfort. I had developed such severe anxiety and insecurity around my perfectionism that I had become quite miserable in my life. I was lying to myself about everything that made me uncomfortable. I had rationalizations and justifications for every failure I experienced. Nothing was ever my fault. 

But my friend knew something about me I didn’t. Where I saw failure and disdain he saw potential. He later told me that he told the announcer to call me because he knew I would run, even if I didn’t know it myself. 

I ran the race in the same heat as my best friend. He was one of the best sprinters in our state and division, only one kid in the division from a different school consistently beat him. My best friend had all of the qualities that I wished I had, drive, determination, an unwavering belief in himself. 

As the race started I took off and kept a pace behind him the best I could. The race was brutal, I posted a terrible time. He beat me by nearly 10 seconds and was bent over at the finish line dry heaving. As I crossed the finish line he looked up at me, struggling to breathe, smiled, and said; “You just lettered.” “What?” I asked between ragged breaths. “You beat the two other guys, you placed in the top 4 of a varsity heat, you just lettered.” I had ran a 1:04, possibly the slowest varsity scoring time in the state.

But this moment is one of the most significant moments of my life because it put me on the path that has led me to where I am today. In this single moment all of my illusions about talent were shattered. I had achieved something that I figured I would never be able to in my high school career. Just because I showed up. I had learned, in the span of a minute of exhausting work, that effort is what matters. 

That year I ended up shaving 11 seconds off of my time in the 400, and qualified for divisionals. I was about 1 second off from qualifying for state in my first year running the race. I had qualified for the varsity 400m on a technicality but through effort over the season I earned that letter. 

Life Lessons

My life has not been perfect since learning this lesson, I still made plenty of mistakes and fell into the trap of insecurity and comfort again and again. But this moment created the foundation from which I’ve been building for the last 10 years. Everything I have achieved in my life thus far can be directly attributed to this moment. Had I not learned this lesson I would have likely accepted the mediocrity I was trying to convince myself was misunderstood exceptionalism. 

I tell people Effort Over Everything because Effort IS Everything. Value effort and hard work over talent, intelligence, luck, or whatever else. Duckworth’s research put a theory to something that I had learned intuitively by being willing to push myself when my friend believed in me. You can’t control your natural intelligence, you can’t control luck and circumstance, but you can control effort. I learned that I was focusing every part of my energy on everything that was out of my control. 

You can’t control the outcomes of your actions in life. But you can control where you place your effort. Learning to accept that effort may not always get you the results you want is vital. So many people, myself included at one point, refuse to attempt anything that they feel they cannot guarantee the outcome of. Consider this; even if you do not get the outcome you want, you learned something from the experience. In this way, applying effort always yields results, even if they may not be the exact results you wanted. You still grow from the experience of trying, and those experiences accumulate into future successes.