Is Struggling The Goal?

“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.

Author: John

Nobel-Prize Winning, MacArthur Genius Grant Near Recipient writing to you regularly about Fitness, Wealth, and Wisdom - How to be happy and how to be healthy. Oh, and rich.

41 thoughts on “Is Struggling The Goal?”

  1. IMHO the country’s biggest problem is mistaking being a character with having character

  2. Before I got my BSEE/MSEE, I worked at a farm, picking cucumbers to be sold to a pickle factory. We got paid by the 5-gal bucket, and it takes a lot of pickle-sized cucumbers to fill one. It was hot and dirty work. Later, I had a summer job in a factory, slicing the slots into collets with a bandsaw. Cut, turn, cut, turn, cut. Next part. Cut, turn, cut, turn, cut. Next part. … So, when I got a professional job, there were opportunities for creative design work, and requirements for tedious design verification and testing. “But at least I’m not picking pickles or cutting collets!” Being willing and able to get the grunt work done has been one factor in my professional success.

    Lathechuck

    1. Another part is never being “above” something. If the sink needs to be fixed, the sink needs to be fixed.

      1. As a matter of fact, I’ve repaired four toilets and one garbage disposal in the last year (as a volunteer for my church). Gettin’ it done, sometimes with a little help from Grainger.

  3. “Nothing in this world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent.”
    ― Calvin Coolidge

  4. People certainly don’t respond well to a lack of challenges. That is evident from the amusing reactions to an election not going there way for millions of people that have never been told no and never been told something is their responsibility. I was one of those kids in school that was never challenged so they put me in the gifted and talented program where they promptly challenged us even less. Shocker, the smartest kids in my school ended up being less “successful” while middling intelligence people who worked hard are now doing quite well for themselves.

    2. Exactly. One of my teachers in high school even called it a curse. One of the reasons (I think) is they build their personas on never failing. And we all fail.

  5. I totally agree with the thrust of your argument. As a “gifted” kid in elementary and high school I was not challenged, I was allowed to coast. As a result I developed my primary personal shortcoming, procrastination. I would routinely study for tests and do homework literally minutes before they were due. In college I was content to be a B student because that left me with time to pursue my study of the opposite sex. In the corporate environment I continued my practice of procrastinating on work assignments in part to create the artificial challenge of having to do a burst of work to finish them on time. Adding to this was the realization that literally 90% of the time the so-called deadline was stretched out or even abandoned due to extraneous factors. My attitude has not been one that helps one get ahead.

    You only struggle if you care about the outcome. And truly caring about something is the strongest and most important motivator of all. With that, you can be the barbarian at the gate who takes the world by storm. Just like Hiro.

    https://www.flickr.com/photos/uflinks/4955876395/

    1. I got through a bunch of classes in college like that, I remember a geology exam where I had skipped class most of the semester and I literally skimmed the pages of the textbook for 15 minutes, took the test, aced it and immediately forgot everything.

      1. Yeah. Skipped all my calculus based physics 2 and differential equations classes in college and still pulled Bs by showing up for the exams.

        I really should have taken a year off. I was so burned out and rudderless at the time.

  6. Good post John. For myself, I was a very good student and lots of things came easily to me. What that meant for the rest of my life is that if something did not come easily I would lose interest and stop doing it. Turns out in life that is not a strategy for success.

      1. …which is why we should not be afraid to fail. I wish I’d learned this earlier in life – because in my ‘younger years’, I was far too afraid of ‘failing’. Why? Failing is bad, isn’t it? At least – that’s what had been driven into my head. I had not yet internalized that this was only true if you don’t learn from your mistakes and/or failures. I later came to understand that when starting a new ‘thing’ (product, business, etc – it’s a bit of a blessing to ‘fail early and often’ – it helps you improve and/or determine if continuing warranted. Sometimes, it’s better to cut your losses and try something different, until technology and/or the market changes.

        Similarly, I also had a business mentor tell me that ‘If none of the things you attempt to do fail – you’re not reaching far / trying hard enough’. Yet another reason to have your goals slightly exceed your reach.

  7. Which person below do you consider more successful?

    Person A is a nuclear physicist who got her Ph.D. and now manages nuclear medicine capabilities at local hospital. She makes good money, but not great money, but her actions have kept hundreds of people alive.

    Person B dropped out of college and now is an influencer with a highly successful YouTube channel. She has a lot of followers, enough that she makes a lot more money than Person A.

    We had this discussion at dinner one night as friend’s family members are in similar situation. It was interesting to see the younger generation tend to view person B as being more successful as it is all about money and “followers”. The older crowd tended to pick A because it was a harder skill to learn and offered much more real value to society.

    3. I’ll go with “A”, because her value is enduring for the length of her career, while the influencer’s popularity can collapse overnight if she gets “cancelled” for something she does, or did years ago.

      Lathechuck

  9. John – of Universe(l) importance. One must start somewhere with PEZ, why not off earth too.

    Taken from a recent blog-post by Robert Zimmerman – 6th paragraph down. Note – Mr. Zimmerman is restricted by NASA from using capitalized 3-character acronyms, hence this presentation of “Pez”.

    https://behindtheblack.com/behind-the-black/essays-and-commentaries/freedom-wins-again-spacex-completes-the-6th-orbital-test-flight-of-starship-superheavy/

    “Starship reached its orbit as planned, carrying for the first time a payload, a single plastic banana suspended by cords in the center of the Pez deployment payload bay where SpaceX hopes to soon begin deploying Starlink satellites. Though somewhat silly, the banana is being used by SpaceX and the FAA to certify future payload operations.”

    For photo & more info on Starship’s Mega-PEZ.
    https://ringwatchers.com/article/ship-pez-dispenser

    You might want to hit Elon up for some copyright infringement of your own uncopyrighted infringement of the original PEZ name. Unless you’re German of course.

    Let’s not even go to the plastic banana discussion.

      1. I seem to recall hearing something like that. Curious.

        Could you hold my beer while I go search for it? 😉

  10. Somebody replied to my Wed AI comment that Kung Fu Fighting was their first cellphone ringtone. That one-hit wonder song was one of my favorites, too – as it was to others back in 2011…

    https://jonathanturley.org/2011/04/27/something-serious-wrong-in-wight-singer-arrested-for-singing-kung-fu-fighting/

    Nowdays, 13 years later, AI gets to say whatever it comes up with, but people are not so lucky.

    https://jonathanturley.org/2024/11/22/great-britain-cracks-down-on-non-crime-hate-speech-including-playground-taunts/

    The ongoing struggle for free speech is the most important struggle of all.

    https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-14113971/elon-musk-mps-billionaire-uk-x-role-summer-riots.html

  11. Intelligence is always a curse, because half the population is below average in it, and 100% of them are jealous.

    No amount of character can overcome that.
    What’s needed to succeed with the handicap of intelligence is pure malicious wrath, and an above-average amount of sociopathy.

  12. I once thought that, because I failed something important, that I was a failure. Then I looked around me…..When you’ve been hit, you go down. The getting up is up to you.

Comments are closed.