Epistemic status: an attempt to highlight a harmful implicit model.
I.
John decided to draw a cute kitten. What he ended up with was a poorly drawn demon with a soul-freezing stare. Disappointed by how far reality fell short of his expectations, John decided he simply had no talent and never picked up a pencil or eraser again.
Luke, who had no experience in writing, decided to put his supposedly flawless ideas into words. He published several articles. He expected a flood of likes and to become one of the most famous philosophers in the world within a month (P = 0.3). However, his articles were read by only a couple dozen people, none of whom even bothered to leave a comment, and they received nothing but dislikes. This hurt Luke, and after that he stopped writing daily and ended up publishing something only once every six months.
A math teacher explained a new topic to the class. Max tried to understand it, but couldn’t. He read the explanation in the textbook. Max still didn’t understand. He read it again. Still nothing. Max went over it one more time. And then—finally—it clicked.
Max always did this in math class.
II.
John will never become a good artist, and Luke will never be able to explain his philosophy to a wide audience. Meanwhile, Max can become a mathematician if he wants to. So what’s the problem with the first two?
Luke and John have the following implicit model: every person has a certain fixed level of talent in a given field, and it doesn’t change. Talent fully explains success in that activity.
If you believe this model, you’ll predict that your first attempts—if you’re talented—should already be somewhere near the level of the best people in the field. Because of this, John and Luke have wildly inflated expectations, and when reality crashes into them, it crashes hard enough that they never want to try again. On top of that, they conclude that since their first attempts failed, they simply aren’t talented and shouldn’t waste time on it.
But are John and Luke actually right? Let’s check.
Monkeys are much worse at math than humans (citation needed), yet almost all hunter-gatherers without formal schooling can count only up to about ten. The gap between a professional mathematician and a hunter-gatherer is an enormous abyss compared to the gap between a hunter-gatherer and a monkey.
(And when people describe someone as intelligent, they often say “fast learner” or “picks things up quickly.”)
So Luke and John are right about one thing: predispositions to different fields do exist, and you can call that “talent.” But they miss the key point: talent affects only the speed of progress and the upper ceiling. It barely influence your first attempt performance.
And once you look at reality, model of Luke and John falls apart pretty quickly.
For example, Stephen King collected dozens of rejections, and he himself said his early writing was bad. George Orwell thought his first novels were weak, and his two most famous books—1984 and Animal Farm—were published near the end of his career. Anton Chekhov’s early stories were formulaic and far from the level of his later work.
The same pattern shows up with artists: the academic drawings of future masters often look like the work of solid students, not geniuses. Early paintings by Pablo Picasso are technically good, but not yet extraordinary. Musicians are no different: almost all great musicians started out sounding like perfectly normal students, and their childhood recordings—if they exist—rarely blow anyone’s mind.
Sure, there are counterexamples. Prodigies like Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart or some chess players really did show impressive skill very early. But even there, their first works weren’t masterpieces. They were above average—not already the best in the world.
One's first attempt is almost always terrible compared to professionals. Future masters became masters because they worked a lot. And they kept working because they enjoyed it. If they had believed that they were supposed to produce brilliance from day one, they would have been constantly disappointed, stopped enjoying the process, and probably quit.
Imagine Sarah is so talented at drawing that she improves three times faster than even the most brilliant artists. But she believes the same talent theory as Luke and John. She spends one hour on a painting and then compares it to the work of an average well-known artist. That artist has, say, 10,000 hours of experience. Sarah has the equivalent of three. Do you think her first painting will be better than a famous artist’s—or much worse? Of course it will be worse. So she gets discouraged and stops drawing.
(Of course, this effect explains only part of why people persist or don’t. I enjoy programming and math, so it’s easy for me to keep trying in those areas. Learning languages, on the other hand, is genuinely boring to me, and no clever reframing will fix that. Meanwhile, some people hate math and genuinely love learning languages.
Still, the effect described in this article strongly influences motivation and is worth keeping in mind. Good framing won’t make you fall in love with something you find boring—but bad framing can absolutely ruin your enjoyment of something you’d otherwise like.)
Praise yourself for progress, not for results. Tell yourself that even if you lost but understood your mistakes, then in fact you won, because you became stronger. Doing something for the first time, try not to do it perfectly, but to do it well for a beginner. If you encounter a chess player who is much stronger than you, do not set the goal of winning; set the goal of taking as many of his pieces with you to hell as possible… well, and of learning his tactics in order to become stronger yourself, of course.
By publishing this article, I do not expect it to conquer the world. If it gets more likes than dislikes, I will already be happy. And that’s fine: thanks to writing this article, I will BECOME STRONGER, and I will pour time and effort into it until I become such a good writer that one of my articles will finally conquer the world.
Conclusion²: Inflated expectations harm motivation. They must be realistic. Talent does not determine first-attempt performance.
Epistemic status: an attempt to highlight a harmful implicit model.
I.
John decided to draw a cute kitten. What he ended up with was a poorly drawn demon with a soul-freezing stare. Disappointed by how far reality fell short of his expectations, John decided he simply had no talent and never picked up a pencil or eraser again.
Luke, who had no experience in writing, decided to put his supposedly flawless ideas into words. He published several articles. He expected a flood of likes and to become one of the most famous philosophers in the world within a month (P = 0.3). However, his articles were read by only a couple dozen people, none of whom even bothered to leave a comment, and they received nothing but dislikes. This hurt Luke, and after that he stopped writing daily and ended up publishing something only once every six months.
A math teacher explained a new topic to the class. Max tried to understand it, but couldn’t. He read the explanation in the textbook. Max still didn’t understand. He read it again. Still nothing. Max went over it one more time. And then—finally—it clicked.
Max always did this in math class.
II.
John will never become a good artist, and Luke will never be able to explain his philosophy to a wide audience. Meanwhile, Max can become a mathematician if he wants to. So what’s the problem with the first two?
Luke and John have the following implicit model: every person has a certain fixed level of talent in a given field, and it doesn’t change. Talent fully explains success in that activity.
If you believe this model, you’ll predict that your first attempts—if you’re talented—should already be somewhere near the level of the best people in the field. Because of this, John and Luke have wildly inflated expectations, and when reality crashes into them, it crashes hard enough that they never want to try again. On top of that, they conclude that since their first attempts failed, they simply aren’t talented and shouldn’t waste time on it.
But are John and Luke actually right? Let’s check.
Monkeys are much worse at math than humans (citation needed), yet almost all hunter-gatherers without formal schooling can count only up to about ten. The gap between a professional mathematician and a hunter-gatherer is an enormous abyss compared to the gap between a hunter-gatherer and a monkey.
(And when people describe someone as intelligent, they often say “fast learner” or “picks things up quickly.”)
So Luke and John are right about one thing: predispositions to different fields do exist, and you can call that “talent.” But they miss the key point: talent affects only the speed of progress and the upper ceiling. It barely influence your first attempt performance.
And once you look at reality, model of Luke and John falls apart pretty quickly.
For example, Stephen King collected dozens of rejections, and he himself said his early writing was bad. George Orwell thought his first novels were weak, and his two most famous books—1984 and Animal Farm—were published near the end of his career. Anton Chekhov’s early stories were formulaic and far from the level of his later work.
The same pattern shows up with artists: the academic drawings of future masters often look like the work of solid students, not geniuses. Early paintings by Pablo Picasso are technically good, but not yet extraordinary. Musicians are no different: almost all great musicians started out sounding like perfectly normal students, and their childhood recordings—if they exist—rarely blow anyone’s mind.
Sure, there are counterexamples. Prodigies like Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart or some chess players really did show impressive skill very early. But even there, their first works weren’t masterpieces. They were above average—not already the best in the world.
One's first attempt is almost always terrible compared to professionals. Future masters became masters because they worked a lot. And they kept working because they enjoyed it. If they had believed that they were supposed to produce brilliance from day one, they would have been constantly disappointed, stopped enjoying the process, and probably quit.
Imagine Sarah is so talented at drawing that she improves three times faster than even the most brilliant artists. But she believes the same talent theory as Luke and John. She spends one hour on a painting and then compares it to the work of an average well-known artist. That artist has, say, 10,000 hours of experience. Sarah has the equivalent of three. Do you think her first painting will be better than a famous artist’s—or much worse? Of course it will be worse. So she gets discouraged and stops drawing.
(Of course, this effect explains only part of why people persist or don’t. I enjoy programming and math, so it’s easy for me to keep trying in those areas. Learning languages, on the other hand, is genuinely boring to me, and no clever reframing will fix that. Meanwhile, some people hate math and genuinely love learning languages.
Still, the effect described in this article strongly influences motivation and is worth keeping in mind. Good framing won’t make you fall in love with something you find boring—but bad framing can absolutely ruin your enjoyment of something you’d otherwise like.)
Related: The Parable of the Talents by Scott
III. Conclusion:
Praise yourself for progress, not for results. Tell yourself that even if you lost but understood your mistakes, then in fact you won, because you became stronger. Doing something for the first time, try not to do it perfectly, but to do it well for a beginner. If you encounter a chess player who is much stronger than you, do not set the goal of winning; set the goal of taking as many of his pieces with you to hell as possible… well, and of learning his tactics in order to become stronger yourself, of course.
By publishing this article, I do not expect it to conquer the world. If it gets more likes than dislikes, I will already be happy. And that’s fine: thanks to writing this article, I will BECOME STRONGER, and I will pour time and effort into it until I become such a good writer that one of my articles will finally conquer the world.
Conclusion²: Inflated expectations harm motivation. They must be realistic. Talent does not determine first-attempt performance.