Haruki Murakami
Two things besides talent
Focus and endurance can be trained
What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, on talent, focus and endurance
Whether a person without talent should bother. He names two other requirements, and says both can be trained.
What actually happened?
Asked what a novelist most needs, he answers talent first, then points out that talent is not something you can manage. You have what you have. The energy in the passage goes to the other two. Focus, and after focus, endurance. Focus is putting your limited powers entirely on one thing for a stretch of hours. Endurance is doing that every day for half a year, a year. Unlike talent, he says, these can be acquired and sharpened through training, in the same way muscle is.
Put down the part you cannot control
How much talent you were given is settled, and worrying about it produces no action. Two of the three are available to work on, so the hours belong there. This is not consolation. It is moving attention from where there is no leverage to where there is some.
I have no talent may even be correct, and it still cannot tell you what to do today.
Focus is worth more than hours
Three hours entirely undivided beat eight broken ones. He gives the early morning to writing, no calls and no visitors, because once concentration breaks, getting back to the same depth costs time again. The quality sits in the depth, not in the total.
Eight hours cut into six pieces produce less than three whole ones.
Endurance is bought by lowering the daily difficulty
Things people sustain for years are usually not very hard on any given day. Setting the daily amount where your worst day can still finish it trades the ceiling of one day for the total of one year. Willpower alone does not survive the first bad stretch.
Four thousand words a day for ten years is far more than twenty thousand a day for two months.
How do I use it today?
Where you are: you want to do something for a long time and keep circling the question of whether you are cut out for it.
Ask first: how many unbroken stretches did I give this in the past week? If none, fix that before talent gets a turn.
Where it goes wrong: using it to deny that talent exists. He puts talent first and only says it is not yours to manage. And endurance is not gritting your teeth. Anything held together by force is not held for long.
Lines to keep
Unlike talent, focus and endurance can be acquired through training.
Talent is not yours to manage. The other two are.
Set the daily amount where your worst day still finishes it.
Endurance that is forced does not survive the first bad stretch.
Same situation, other people are asking
When people near me do well, something in me goes cold.Is he better than me, or just three years earlier?He's a step ahead of me on everything.Am I doing the work, or proving something?Someone is ahead of me · all 14 questions →If this one named what you are going through,
send it to someone who needs it, or keep it somewhere you will find it again.