A Talent for Hard Work

I posed this question on my Facebook:

"What's more important? Hard work or talent? What if one has no talent for hard work?"

This was meant as a little tongue-in-cheek wordplay, but it led to a pretty big discussion. The deeper my friends and I dove into this, the more interesting it got.

Talent and hard work are both abstract generalizations, but it is implied that talent is something you have or do not have, whereas hard work is something that you can choose or not choose to do. I'm not sure this is right.

My friend, Oregon artist Darren Orange, suggests that which is most important to have is a "full tank of never ending determination."

But, where does determination come from. If this is the fuel for hard work, then surely it can't come from hard work. Maybe, and this is the heart or what I meant by "what if one has no talent for hard work?" We think of talent as some kind of "stuff" but maybe hard work is, too -- by which I mean the capacity for it. Maybe this hard work stuff is just as elusive as capricious as talent.

Talent is valued because it is rare, and because someone who is talented can do things that can't be done with just brute force. One can master every fact of music theory, but still fail to compose a masterpiece. This is where team Talent is coming from, I think. Several us feel this acutely: that you just don't get off the ground without talent.

Talent supplies ideas. The creative spark that births a piece of art or the solution to a problem or a new way of understanding religion or culture or politics or economics. Talent and creativity aren't just for the arts, they are for everything that Humans do.

Animals rarely innovate. If they do, it's usually because a Human has put them in an artificial situation. Natural environments don't change very rapidly, in that absence of Humans. Chimpanzees don't need to stack boxes to get food in the wild. They don't even have boxes. But they can figure it out if we put them in a room with nothing but boxes and a bunch of bananas hanging from the ceiling. ( Or was that gorillas? )

I nearly deleted that paragraph. As I wrote it I thought "this is going off the rails." Then I saw the analogy. Talent is making the leap to stacking boxes. Hard work is just jumping, over and over. But it the bananas are too high, then hard work loses.

So talent is absolutely necessary, but then, as those who value hard work will certainly remind us, once you have the idea, that's when the work starts. The idea is just the beginning, and it's worthless without action. The idea of stacking the boxes doesn't do any good until the boxes are actually stacked.

Hard work is valued because it is obviously useful, but there is also a moral element to it. As a couple friends pointed out, we feel that people who work hard deserve the results of that labor. Talent is just luck. It feels undeserved. It's cool, but we wonder if the person who got it really earned it.

But what if those who work hard are also just playing a lucky hand? It's certainly lucky to be free of depression, anxiety, and other debilitating psychological conditions which deeply complicate this question. And then there's compulsion. What if the hard-workers are somehow driven to do so? What if it's just as hard for a workaholic to stay home as it is for me to get out of bed?

But let's table the discussion of disability. Let's try to establish a point zero, and see if we can even figure anything out from there. I really want to get to the bottom of this. What is this determination? Motivation? Energy? Optimism? I'm just using different language and different metaphors to say the same thing, in hopes that there is a clue. Where does drive come from? Where does determination come from? What about passion and desire? Where do they come from? And what gives that moral value?

Everyone admires those with discipline, will power, integrity, courage, and fortitude. But where did those things come from? What kind of hard work earns them? Why is it praiseworthy? Why is it better, morally, to have it than talent?

For that matter, where does talent come from? Are they both a matter of luck? Or maybe both can be cultivated? I see no evidence of that in myself, but maybe I haven't tried hard enough. But how could I? Without even a little bit of determination, how do I grow more?

This is a serious discussion, not an argument, so I'll rebut my own point. The answer is to do it incrementally. Build little habits and then build upon them. The answer is also in alignment: some things out there, some goals, will inspire more than others. Chase those things that call to you, like breadcrumbs that lead out of the forest. Maybe talent waits for you, there.

I guess that's the answer to my question: what do you do if you have no talent for hard work? You find whatever strengths you do have, and follow them. I don't really know if this works or not. I feel like there have been times in my life when I was driven. The feeling is being pulled rather than pushing. Hard work, for me, when it happens, has been effortless in a very particular sense. Not in the sense that it was not taxing or difficult or without frustration, but it wasn't hard to decide to do it. That's the difference. That's the magic called flow. That's when everything comes together for a magical time and something amazing happens.

But, I don't know. Maybe finding that magic is a talent, itself. And that puts us right back at the beginning.