“He’s talented. Leave it at that.” – Goodfellas
Is it okay to sleep with a second cousin? The first one didn’t seem to mind.
Gifts can be a curse. No, I’m not talking about getting the Untitled Goose Simulator™, where you pretend to be a goose (this is a real thing) and honk at people as a Christmas gift. I’m talking about those innate talents that we’re born with.
Most of these talents are things that can be shown with a bell curve: height, intelligence, attractiveness, armpit odor, quickness, strength, charisma and the like. These are the normal human attributes that people have and that are assigned by dice roll in D&D® and by genetics and dice roll in reality. Mostly, these are things that you either can’t change (height) or can only influence. I’m born with the capacity for a maximum specific I.Q. and, though I might hone it through practice, the maximum capacity is always there.
I always was comfortable dating that blind woman. I knew she wasn’t seeing anyone else.
The flip side is what we do with those talents. Just like people are born with certain innate abilities, I also believe that they are born with certain tendencies: diligence, agreeableness, stubbornness, and honesty, for example. These are different than talent. While we are born with talents, these personality traits are much more malleable.
We call them, collectively, character.
Back to the idea of a curse. I’ve seen very intelligent kids emerge from school – these kids are two or three standard deviations above the norm in intelligence. That puts them in the range of 130-145 I.Q., and there are only a couple of million people that fit that description in the United States.
Yet, I’ve seen these very intelligent folks fail, and fail spectacularly.
Why?
Well, just like a pretty girl can only count on her looks for so long, a smart person (let’s call him Hiro Protagonist, he’s Korean/American, after all), no matter how smart, can only rely on their raw intelligence for so long. At some point, Hiro is surrounded by people just as smart as he is. Put Hiro into a classroom of geniuses with a genius professor, and now? Hiro is average.
It’s weird they advise to not talk about money during a job interview. When am I supposed to bribe them?
But if those other geniuses have learned how to work, how to be diligent, how to be internally motivated to meet a goal and the other collective traits we call “character” and Protagonist hasn’t?
Protagonist is toast. He will fail, and fail spectacularly. In fact, based on my experience, a person of great talent will almost always underperform someone of moderate talent who has character. Too much talent hobbles a person and never allows them to develop.
This isn’t limited to intellectual tasks – it’s very apparent in sports, which is one of the more objective things that humanity does. Who is the fastest runner in the 109.3613 yard dash? There’s a record for it.
On my birth, if I had worked really hard, and devoted my life to getting that record, would I have achieved it?
Of course not. There is a zero chance that I could run 109.3613 yards in 9.58 seconds at any point in my life, even given all of the effort in the world and all of the best training.
Zero.
To own a world record requires both talent and the character and discipline to develop the talent.
Without character, the talent is a curse.
Incompetence, unburdened by character.
In that respect, challenge and adversity are blessings, especially if they occur early in life. Highly functioning groups often have a shared adversity so that everyone knows that each member of the group has been through the same initiation.
These initiation rituals mean that, although there are certainly differences between people, the one thing that we know is that they have been through a challenge, and passed.
Those who fail? Well, it tells us a lot about them, too. I think that’s at least partially responsible for the Latin phrase: “mens sana in corpore sano” – a sound mind in a sound body. Smart people were made to work hard physically to improve themselves and those with physical talent were made to work hard intellectually. I guess maybe someone writing about archetypes would call this “Hiro’s Journey”.
It wasn’t being physical or intellectual that was the point – it was the hard work and determination required to get better that was the point. Life is struggle, and sometimes we can’t see the point of it. Norman Vincent Peale, who, despite his last name was not involved in the fruit and vegetable processing industry, had a quote when someone asked him about the afterlife.
I guess it’s better than the previous film – Taken: Out of Context.
I read it at least three decades ago, so, being lazy, I’ll paraphrase his response:
“How can you, looking at life today, be assured of an afterlife? Imagine you were a baby, in warm, safe environment. Temperature a perfect 98.6K. Life was good, right? Then sudden pressure, pain, and constriction like you’d never known. And then? Light, bright light, everywhere around you, the cooling air against your wet skin, and suddenly, a need to breathe in deeply to take your first breath of air. Now, imagine that life is like being a baby being born….”
I’m not at all sure that he said any of those words in anything like that order, but I know that I go the spirit of the answer right. Life isn’t about being comfortable. Life isn’t about being safe. Life is about learning and growing, and both of those things are exceptionally uncomfortable.
Do Viking clowns go to ValHaHa when they die on stage?
Without the challenge, our character suffers. Without the struggle, all of the gifts we are born with become curses.
Looks like the real gift is adversity, testing us and allowing us to build the character required for the next level. Maybe the Untitled Goose Game© is just the thing after all.
Honk! You, too, can be a Hiro.
But it isn’t easy.
