Don’t Turn Your Blessing Into A Curse

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“Having natural talent is a blessing, but you can turn it into a curse if you take it for granted. If you use it as a crutch, if you just rely on it and stop developing other parts of your game, you hit an early asymptote.

And when you get to a certain level, everybody has natural talent, and some of those people also work extremely hard. Natural talent is not going to take you all the way.

In the original Pasadena program, we’d get some 6th graders who were incredibly sharp – and oddly enough, often it was the sharpest 6th graders who could do the most work in their head, who would struggle the most a year later because they were so resistant to writing anything down.

There were others who were sharp like that, but also wrote things down, and things went smoothly for them. They went really far very quickly. Didn’t hit walls.

But the ones who were very stubborn and used their outsized working memory as a crutch, they could only solve problems that they could fit entirely into their working memory without usage of paper and pencil, and that came back to bite them as the complexity of problems increased.

In sports, too, you see this in guys who are blessed with speed. They have a higher gear and they can just run around people, whether it’s basketball or football or soccer or whatever. That speed was a weapon. Huge advantage.

But the problem is: if you have a lot of speed, you can use that as a crutch instead of learning the skills. Guys who didn’t have that would be like “well, I got to learn a lot more technical skills.” The speedster would be like “I don’t have to worry about that.” And then you get far enough along that everyone is fast, and you’re still fast but not so much faster that you can get past people on the basis of speed alone. Doesn’t work anymore.

And then all of a sudden, you go from being way ahead to way behind. You should have spent years developing these fundamental skills, but you were special, so you didn’t have to do things that other people had to do. You should have been doing them anyway, and it finally caught up with you.

The more of an advantage this inherent gift gives you, the harder it is to break away from relying on it as a crutch. If it seems to work every time, why would you not use it? And conventional knowledge is to lean into what works, right? It gets locked in and becomes so hard to break.

Unfortunately, it can be hard to untangle the difference between leaning into what works versus using what’s currently working as a crutch. It can be really subtle. Sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference in the moment, even though in the long-term, the difference is two completely different trajectories.”

(weaving together snippets from our discussion starting ~20:28)

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