The Myth of Being Bad at Success
Around the time I started Seattle CoderDojo, the Atlantic published a piece titled “The Myth of ‘I’m Bad at Math’.” Boiled down, it’s about how we find ourselves confronted with people who are better than us at something and how we convince ourselves it’s because they have an innate talent we don’t have. Usually it’s just that they’ve had more exposure, more practice, and often more interest. But because we convince ourselves mastery of that thing boils down to talent, rather than hard work, we start to believe that we can’t master it and we create a personal mythology of being bad at something.
But I’ve been seeing a meme around the net about “10 Things That Require Zero Talent” and I believe that it is really just a sad way of (un)intentionally making people who aren’t currently good at these things create this same kind of self-limiting personal mythology. Here’s the list:
- Being on time
- Work ethic
- Effort
- Body language
- Energy