Talent Is Never Enough

Summer cicadas, evening sun, graphite iBook, library book open on my desk: programming Ruby, page open to file I/O. My code doesn't run. I have no idea why. I can repeat a textbook definition for each keyword. Put it all together and my mind decides anything else is more interesting. Watering the tree of knowledge hasn't produced understanding. No intellectus. So I shrug and copy the following exercise precisely as written. I just want my project to work.

The code runs. I close the book.

Why? Because it took too long. Because I had to think too hard. Or maybe because somewhere along the way, I'd learned the simple equation of easy = meant for me. Logical inversion: difficult = not meant for me. If programming was meant for me, it wouldn't be difficult.

Fast forward three weeks--or maybe rewind a year. Human memory unaided by Mnemosyne's art gets fuzzy under the best of conditions.

26-string folk harp tuned to the key of E-flat. I had started playing before my first lesson. I'd been holding my hands wrong. My new teacher fixed that, then started me with single notes. I played those. We graduated to a scale and an arpeggio. I played those too. Still time remaining in the half-hour lesson. My teacher was a proponent of learning music through playing songs, and the song she chose was Brian Boru's March. First section. Thumb crossing over fingers in musical spacetime: something clicks in my brain. This is music. Intellectus. Knowledge meets understanding. Second section, same thing, different notes. You get the idea: I played the whole song. Only melody was required that week, but my teacher demonstrated chords before she left. Soon I was playing those too.

Equation in action. Music came easily, so it was meant for me. Ruby file I/O didn't, so it wasn't. Thus concluded my calculus.

Unfortunately, it was wrong.

Fifteen years later, I would now consider myself a very average harpist. But I certainly did have an easier time in the beginning with one of these things than the other. I had been gifted some measure of talent. And talent teaches a simple decision-making structure: follow what comes easily.

For years, talent made me feel like I belonged in the world of music despite lingering fears of being shut out if it ever became too difficult. Talent isn't bad, of course. Having natural aptitude is a gift. But talent makes a great friend and a terrible teacher. When it teaches you that the things worth doing should feel effortless, and that the difficult things aren't worth doing, it becomes an enabler. The best things in life are difficult. The things which matter most are rarely easy.

Of course talent didn't last forever. It never does. Songs started getting harder to play. Entering flow state as I'd felt it in my first lesson started getting harder too.

It all began shortly after I moved on to my next harp teacher, whose style was to assign more exercises and fewer songs that were substantially more difficult. Every musician has a piece or a few where they hit a learning wall--or a cliff--and struggle to improve enough to play it. Mine was Camille Saint-Saëns's Fantaisie for harp, op. 95. It's a beautiful piece. Introspective, intelligent, harmonious, complex: I fell in love immediately. I also learned it too soon.

The trouble comes at the very end: a dal segno section that requires significant physical strength and dexterity. In fairness to her, I don't think my harp teacher expected me to fully master it at that point. But I was still operating under the old rules--if I couldn't play it easily, something was wrong. Perhaps my teacher came to agree as the months passed on and I seemed no closer to playing that section than when I first began. The solution? I didn't.

This isn't unheard of. Even some recordings omit that section. But skipping the hard part became my answer to everything that felt too difficult. Why struggle when I could just... press... skip?

Meanwhile the pressure was mounting. Somewhere along the way I had fallen under the impression that if I wanted to continue playing, I needed to go pro. I owned my harp--most students don't--which had been a significant investment by my parents. The instrument in my bedroom wasn't an instrument anymore. It was my future career, my relationships with the people around me, and my personal identity. And all throughout those endless summers I slowly came to the sinking realization that none of those things were me.

Perhaps others would have reacted by working harder. Me? I started coasting and found enjoyment in my other interests. Unfortunately, since I was also at the stage with those interests where they had stopped coming easily, I didn't pursue them seriously either.

Not only had I lost the desire to practice difficult pieces, I was no longer convinced I even had the capability for it. This wasn't the fault of my harp teacher, who always maintained that I had the ability to play professionally. However, the effect on me was that I felt locked into music. Her encouragement simply became another source of pressure. I had learned to avoid difficulty; now difficulty was everywhere I looked.

When harp practice became a chore, I found solace in one thing that still brought me joy: writing my own arrangements. Sitting at my instrument, working out how to make a chord progression idiomatic to the harp, hearing music flow under my fingers once again... Gradually, arrangements turned into original pieces. As luck would have it, there was no harp major at my university, but there was a music composition option. I seized the opportunity.

Composition didn't come preinstalled with intellectus. I took pages of notes in theory class, spent hours at the computer or piano picking at the keys, and still seemingly always headed into comp lessons with less material than I had planned. Picture me in the practice room at 11 PM: not touching the harp at all, hunched over manuscript paper, writing and crossing out the same four measures, finally heading out just in time to make a run for the bus back to my dorm. I wrote in long sessions when the lightning struck, but also in short bursts: before class, during lunch, on the ride home. Outside of marathon practice sessions for my own works, I composed more than I played.

One of the nicest things that an instructor told me in college was that I was a very conscientious student. In that moment of my life, it meant a lot. My teachers sometimes saw more in me than I myself did. Often, really.

And yet, I didn't pursue music as a career after I graduated.

Why?

It was too difficult.

It wasn't just music. Every time something felt difficult, I defaulted to the easiest option. My work, my relationships, my health, my life--all running on autopilot until they no longer could. The pattern repeated infinitely all around me once I had seen it.

At some point, I had to ask myself: was I living the life that I wanted, or the one that was easy?

Looking back, I saw how I had chosen the path of least resistance time after time and made decisions based on what was easiest rather than what I really wanted to do. And I realized that I hated the life I was living.

The voice in my head kept talking louder and louder:

"You can never go back."

"You aren't good enough."

"You can't do it."

I had listened to that voice for a very long time. But the life I wanted was only possible if what it said was a lie.

So I finally, finally listened to my teachers instead. I could do it. Because I am myself. Not what I do, not whether I am good or bad, not even my own past decisions. And suddenly, everything that I had thought impossible began to become reality before my eyes.

I remembered my struggles with harp very well. I had learned one lesson from them: talent is not enough to succeed. I'd never developed the skills to push through difficulty. I was a conscientious student in academia, but far from being one in life. But everything worth having takes effort. I determined to rebuild my life from the ground up. No more skipping sections.

Then I remembered something else: coding. It wasn't something that I was talented at, nor was it something that I was deeply passionate about. It was simply one of many things that I had once dreamed of. A dream I had abandoned at the end of those endless summers along with another part of myself. Ruby exercises, graphite iBook, my own younger self who had wanted to learn how to talk to computers. Younger, sadder, kinder, bolder. In many ways, more whole.

Maybe I could go back. Maybe I could give that dream form. Not because it was difficult or easy. Because it was something that I had decided to do, no matter the cost.

Why programming? To prove to myself that I could do it. Why web development? Because it built on skills I already had. All those hours spent getting Linux to play ball with NVIDIA Optimus, dabbling with Python and Ruby, and customizing CSS themes for Electron apps paid off. I sped through creating content in HTML and CSS. I brute force memorized selectors and muddled through Flexbox. But then there it was. JavaScript. Without knowing how to write code, you're not a programmer, but an amateur.

Make variable, ask for input, print output. I already knew how to do all of these things. But as soon as I got to something a little bit more advanced...

Write a function to capitalize the first letter of any string.

Here we go again. I can get a string; I can look up functions to change case; I can get input and print output. But put all of these things together, and my brain wanted to shut down. I wrote pseudocode instead.

// lowercase entire string
// split string into array
// make variable which holds first character of string
// uppercase it
// replace original first character with uppercased version
// return new string

Translate each line to JavaScript. The code ran. Except... it didn't. It did not produce the correct result at all. It returned the original string, uppercased, as an element in an array.

This was the point where I would have closed the book. So instead I decided to come together with the Divine and reason. I read the docs.

As in many things, the error was rooted in misunderstanding. My pseudocode relied on obtaining an array of characters and swapping one out. Obviously my code was not doing what I thought it was doing, since join() was not joining anything, and debugging indicated that split() was not truly splitting anything either, as str[0] was still returning the whole string. Since I wanted to split str into individual characters, I had been passing an empty separator parameter to split(). This returns an array of a single element containing the whole original string, not an array of characters. Quite naturally, str[0] was dutifully looking for the first element of the array. As soon as I realized that one accomplished what I wanted to do by passing an empty string to split()...

Fingers crossing over keys. Knowledge meets understanding, again.

function capitalize(str) {
  str = string.toLowerCase();
  str = string.split("");
  str[0] = str[0].toUpperCase();
  str = string.join("");
  return str;
}

I have always had good relationships with my teachers. I still recall many of the encouraging things they said to me. For the longest time, I could not understand why they had said them. The only way to reconcile their words with my own negative self-image was to accept that I was wrong and they were right:

I can do it. Everyone can.

I still love music. But I no longer limit myself to the styles or instruments for which I have a natural affinity. No longer do I play harp because I have a talent. I play when and because I want to.

There are many consequences to believing that one should only do those things which come easily, naturally, immediately. When they no longer do, it is easy to rationalize that they were not meant for you after all, or worse, that they were not worthwhile. It is all too easy to fall from that mindset into listening to the voices of those who do not know joy. Perhaps the exercise of will in choosing to listen to someone else instead was the true purpose and meaning of Apollon's gift.