And ultimately, it worked. I played a few games for the XV. I proved the doubters wrong. I achieved my goal. And I was still actually pretty useless at rugby.
And ultimately, it worked. I played a few games for the XV. I proved the doubters wrong. I achieved my goal. And I was still actually pretty useless at rugby.
I knew what it felt like to be effortlessly good at something, because I had that academically; when it came to maths tests, spelling bees, quizzes – I just had it. “Do you know how easy this is for me? Do you have any fucking idea how easy this is? This is a fucking joke! And I’m sorry you can’t do this, I really am because I wouldn’t have to fucking sit here and watch you fumble around and fuck it up.” In the classroom, I was Will Hunting; on the rugby pitch, I fumbled around and fucked it up. It didn’t matter that I’d spent three years getting bigger and stronger and fitter and faster – I still wasn’t anywhere near the level of the players with actual talent. They could see the game, they knew how to be in the right place at the right time, they could throw the final pass – and I had spent enough time trying to be like that that I knew I never could. I spent 8 years at school with a guy who’s probably going to be an Olympic hurdler this year; he had talent. And so it didn’t matter how many Tri-Nations games I watched or how many pushups I did, because I’d never get it like they did. I had worked as hard as I could, and it wasn’t ever going to be good enough. That was my Scott Alexander sweating blood experience. I learned what it felt like to stick with something. But my learning from that experience was that next time I should make sure I sweated blood working on a strength. Do more of what comes naturally.
I knew what it felt like to be effortlessly good at something, because I had that academically; when it came to maths tests, spelling bees, quizzes – I just had it. “Do you know how easy this is for me? Do you have any fucking idea how easy this is? This is a fucking joke! And I’m sorry you can’t do this, I really am because I wouldn’t have to fucking sit here and watch you fumble around and fuck it up.” In the classroom, I was Will Hunting; on the rugby pitch, I fumbled around and fucked it up. It didn’t matter that I’d spent three years getting bigger and stronger and fitter and faster – I still wasn’t anywhere near the level of the players with actual talent. They could see the game, they knew how to be in the right place at the right time, they could throw the final pass – and I had spent enough time trying to be like that that I knew I never could. I spent 8 years at school with a guy who’s probably going to be an Olympic hurdler this year; he had talent. And so it didn’t matter how many Tri-Nations games I watched or how many pushups I did, because I’d never get it like they did. I had worked as hard as I could, and it wasn’t ever going to be good enough. That was my Scott Alexander sweating blood experience. I learned what it felt like to stick with something. But my learning from that experience was that next time I should make sure I sweated blood working on a strength. Do more of what comes naturally.
I’ve spent the last few years trying to figure out what that is. I studied linear algebra, I read Marsilius of Padua, I wrote essays, I wrote SQL, I managed ad campaigns, I travelled the world selling software, I hired and fired a team, I tried to respond to messages in 10 seconds, I networked my way into industries and learned what makes them tick, and I raised some venture capital. Some of that felt natural; some of it didn’t. I’m still looking for what comes next. I was in LA last week, on a mission to meet great people. The best person I met was the World’s Strongest Man, Martins Licis, at his gym in El Segundo. It was a complete accident; I didn’t know he was there, and I didn’t expect to work out that day. But the reason I was able to walk in and learn strongman from the best in the world was all those hours spent under a bar, squatting until my nose bled. So I guess it’s ok to bake bread even if you’re not a baker – we’re all allowed hobbies. Just don’t make it your full-time job.
I’ve spent the last few years trying to figure out what that is. I studied linear algebra, I read Marsilius of Padua, I wrote essays, I wrote SQL, I managed ad campaigns, I travelled the world selling software, I hired and fired a team, I tried to respond to messages in 10 seconds, I networked my way into industries and learned what makes them tick, and I raised some venture capital. Some of that felt natural; some of it didn’t. I’m still looking for what comes next. I was in LA last week, on a mission to meet great people. The best person I met was the World’s Strongest Man, Martins Licis, at his gym in El Segundo. It was a complete accident; I didn’t know he was there, and I didn’t expect to work out that day. But the reason I was able to walk in and learn strongman from the best in the world was all those hours spent under a bar, squatting until my nose bled. So I guess it’s ok to bake bread even if you’re not a baker – we’re all allowed hobbies. Just don’t make it your full-time job.
“Consider for a moment Srinivasa Ramanujan, one of the greatest mathematicians of all time. He grew up in poverty in a one-room house in small-town India. He taught himself mathematics by borrowing books from local college students and working through the problems on his own until he reached the end of the solveable ones and had nowhere else to go but inventing ways to solve the unsolveable ones.
There are a lot of poor people in the United States today whose life circumstances prevented their parents from reading books to them as a child, prevented them from getting into the best schools, prevented them from attending college, et cetera. And pretty much all of those people still got more educational opportunities than Ramanujan did.
And from there we can go in one of two directions. First, we can say that a lot of intelligence is innate, that Ramanujan was a genius, and that we mortals cannot be expected to replicate his accomplishments.
… In high school English, I got A++s in all my classes, Principal’s Gold Medals, 100%s on tests, first prize in various state-wide essay contests, etc. In Math, I just barely by the skin of my teeth scraped together a pass in Calculus with a C-.
On the other hand, to this day I believe I deserve a fricking statue for getting a C- in Calculus I. It should be in the center of the schoolyard, and have a plaque saying something like “Scott Alexander, who by making a herculean effort managed to pass Calculus I, even though they kept throwing random things after the little curly S sign and pretending it made sense.”
And without some notion of innate ability, I don’t know what to do with this experience. I don’t want to have to accept the blame for being a lazy person who just didn’t try hard enough in Math. But I really don’t want to have to accept the credit for being a virtuous and studious English student who worked harder than his peers. …
When I was 6 and my brother was 4, our mom decided that as an Overachieving Jewish Mother she was contractually obligated to make both of us learn to play piano. She enrolled me in a Yamaha introductory piano class, and my younger brother in a Yamaha ‘cute little kids bang on the keyboard’ class.
A little while later, I noticed that my brother was now by far the best student in my Introductory Piano Class, even though he had just started and was two or three years younger than anyone else there.
A little while later, Yamaha USA flew him to Japan to show him off before the Yamaha corporate honchos there.
Every so often I wonder if somewhere deep inside me there is the potential to be “among the top musicians of my generation.” I try to recollect whether my brother practiced harder than I did. My memories are hazy, but I don’t think he practiced much harder until well after his career as a child prodigy had taken off.
I dunno. But I don’t think of myself as working hard at any of the things I am good at, in the sense of “exerting vast willpower to force myself kicking and screaming to do them”. It’s possible I do work hard, and that an outside observer would accuse me of eliding how hard I work, but it’s not a conscious elision and I don’t feel that way from the inside.
“I have had a really busy few months. I think it will be letting up soon, but I’m not sure. And I’ve told a lot of people who needed things from me, for one reason or another, “I’m sorry, I’m too busy to take care of this right now.”
And I worry that some of those people read my blog and think “Wait, if you have enough time to write blog posts nearly every day, some of which are up to six thousand words long, why don’t you have enough time to do a couple of hours work for me?”
And the answer is – you fancy doctors with your mathematics and subtraction might say that I could just take a couple of hours away from blogging and use those free hours to write that one thing or analyze that one study or whatever, but you’re not going to fool me.
Erdös’s genius, then, was that his 19 hour workdays were “essentially free”. He didn’t sweat blood and push though his brain’s aversion to doing maths – it must have come pretty naturally to him. So it’s really important to do things that come naturally to you.
I suspect that for Donovan, this didn’t feel like sweating blood – it was just how he was wired. Some people (not me!) are slow repliers, some people hate always being available, and those people are going to be terrible investment bankers and Jim Donovan is going to take their clients. Because for him, this stuff came naturally. He’s a 99.999th percentile voicemail replier. He was born to do it – and what’s awesome is that he found a way to turn his natural talent into loads of money.
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