Thoughts on "slow and steady wins the race": intelligence, hard work, wastefulness, what to focus on

Here are some stream of consciousness musings on the concept of "slow and steady wins the race".

The "talent vs. work" fallacy

I'm sure you've heard over a hundred times in a hundred rousing motivational speeches that hard work matters, and that "hard work beats talent".

Frankly, that comparison in a vacuum is bizarre. In many of my other articles , I've made mentions of "yin" and "yang" under a few different names, and noted that "pure yin" and "pure yang" would be immensely impractical, and that things involve a combination of both of them. Likewise, both "pure talent" and "pure work" are equally inviable, and both lead to nothing. Think about it: pure talent without any work means nothing is produced in spite of immense potential. Pure work without any talent means nothing is achieved in spite of immense effort.

Comparing work to talent in these motivational speeches is done from a very biased angle, where work has an immense advantage in the theoretical competition. The image of "hard work" that is conjured in those examples usually entails some innate capability in the worker (capability is on the spectrum of talent) and a concept of improvement, which is itself also on the spectrum of talent. Our theoretical hard worker has the advantage of working hard while having a significant degree of talent. This is contrasted to a numb and disadvantaged image of talent, who may be extremely innately good at this skill in question, but does not put any work into it. A worker with talent is compared to someone with slightly more talent but who cannot work at all. Obviously the first dude wins; the competition is rigged.

Talent and intelligence matter, a lot

Funnily enough, if we "equalize" the above comparison a bit, and allow the talented competitor to make an effort and work, though less hard than his less talented competitor, he will usually win.

Let's take some examples of people at the peak of their discipline: let's say Novak Djokovic in tennis, Albert Einstein in physics, Warren Buffett for investing. I assure you that there are tennis players who have trained harder and performed more drills and put in more hours than Djokovic. That there are physicists who spend far more time experimenting and working and researching than Einstein did when he published those Annus Mirabilis papers. That there are people who spend far more time and energy with investments and focus on money than Buffett did. Yet it's Djokovic, Einstein, and Buffett who end up undeniably among "the best". It's not that they didn't work hard, but they had some edge of talent or creativity or some other quality separate from hard work that exceeded that of their more hard-working peers.

This shouldn't be surprising, and I'd say it's the logical conclusion. Given that both actors are working at all, and that both actors have some talent at all, then excess talent should pay far more dividends than excess work. Especially when that talent is intelligence. I believe that intelligence factors into the "talent" of most other disciplines as well, including sports and art. It makes complete sense that intelligence drives "success" more than hard work. Intelligence overarches these other things; intelligence can help us use our time effectively and optimally modulate how much time we spend on things, and what to spend it on. Intelligence allows us to change our own training regimen. It is obvious that these "meta-factors" are immensely valuable. They exponentially chain the value that work can provide; while going along a less optimal regimen of work and being unable to think outside that box would provide value for sure, but it would far less than being able to think beyond it.

Think of war in ancient times. Imagine one army, consisting of a huge mass of vicious, strong, and valient soldiers, who fight hard till the very last breath. Their weapons are spears and swords. Then the opposing army, relatively lacking in muscle or bravery or endurance, but smart and rational. Assuming that the second army satisfies some basic threshold of resources and capability of its soldiers, all they have to do is use their brain, and they can win the war easily. For example, they innovate arrows and rain them from their fortifications. They go and forge allyships with neighboring powers. They scout their enemy and find their weak points. They plan sneak attacks and traps. They develop a catapult while their opponent is still stuck in the bronze age with swords and spears. As valiant as that first army is, they are still innately finite and limited, and will be destroyed by superior intelligence. War is not won by muscle, but by strategy. The decisive factor here was not effort, otherwise the strongmen with clubs would always win. It was intelligence that won the wars.

Humanity is not the "king of animals" because of effort or hard work. Other animals work far harder than humans, and expend far more energy than humans could dream of. Humans are set apart by their brain, and are in the position they are in now because of that superior intelligence, rather than superior effort. Of course, early humans put in a lot of effort; but that was merely setting the stage for the brilliance of intelligence.

Reframing talent

Another common fallacy is to hear talent being touted as something entirely separate from hard work.

Many things are not as simple as they seem. Often it is easy to explain away strong ability as emanating from some "innate talent" that comes packaged as a person's attribute from birth. In reality, I feel like this is almost never the case. Frequently, what is called "talent" comes from doing and thinking in some way. As an example, consider the trait most associated with "innate talent": intelligence. Many would have us believe that intelligence is linked to some static, unchangeable "IQ" score that was assigned to us at birth, and thus that intelligence exists as some natural hierarchy with a huge mass at the middle and boundless arrogant joy for those lucky few who are slightly higher than that.

I believe this view is mistaken and incomplete. A lot of intelligence and "genius" and creativity comes from constant thinking about the world. It comes from constant perceptions and analysis of things, constant development and refinement of theories, immersion in certain classes of problems or hobbies (for example, interest in mathematics or physics or art), from which practice naturally arises and people can improve their mental faculty without friction. And once that process gets going, it accelerates. Because those who explore and think outside of the box tend to stumble or come across profound ideas that then change the lens of further ideas, and thoughts adapt and optimize themselves in even more creative and perceptive ways (obvious connection to neuroplasticity), and this introduces a recursive process of accelerated intelligence.

Read the Wikipedia pages of many celebrated geniuses and you will see that many of them engaged in such a lifestyle from a young age, often with the support of their parents. We can therefore reframe intelligence a bit: a large chunk of intelligence arises from hard work. That lifestyle I mentioned involves a gearing of one's life towards solving problems, finding patterns, and being interested in nature. For some this feels natural and may not even feel like work, but it is clear that living like this, and constantly thinking like this, natural or not, puts the brain to hard work.

Those psychology researchers who claim to have ideological monopoly over what it means to be intelligent, and that IQ is a static attribute, and who themselves do not have IQ's at the genius level, and definitely do not have the high IQ needed to develop a good measure or theory of intelligence, are thankfully mistaken to some extent. It makes sense that they "experimentally found" that IQ's don't change. That's because people don't change and lifestyles don't change. Thought patterns don't change with the snap of a finger. But if people started thinking in a more rational, exploratory, creative, and interested way after the first IQ test, the researchers would probably find that their second score increases a lot after some moderate amount of time. But the occurrence of an individual reframing their life towards a more creative and thoughtful lens seems to be a rare scenario. And the probability of this occurring is minimized by this poisonous idea that seeps into people's consciousness thanks to those arrogant researchers; that people can do nothing to become more intelligent, and are relegated to only "working harder"; so they give up on trying to be more intelligent, or bothering to attempt those things restricted to the "intelligent few". The thought is disheartening, and thankfully false.

Talent vs. work: from the perspective of focus

Here's where I'm going to loop in the story of "slow and steady wins the race".

In the previous sections I outlined that the general concept of "hard work vs. talent" is spurious and malformed. It definitely gets at something, but the way it is articulated does not capture the nature of the problem it links to.

Most people hearing the "hard work vs. talent" spiels are the ones browsing for motivational content on YouTube or some blog or seminar or their entrepreneur friends. In other words, it is usually told contextually with the intent to soothe those who feel they have no talent (and, dually, to pump up the value of those motivational speakers, who want to position themselves as gurus above the masses of sheep who need a shepherd, and can then lay claim to their own rock-hard discipline and strength and hard work, and will ironically then tell you about their sharp business decisions and impressive feats based on raw talent, but I'll ignore that frame in this article). From the perspective of those lost souls lacking in belief in their own talent, but ironically also lacking in that hard work preached by those speakers (otherwise they would be doing something instead of watching the video with a popcorn bowl in hand), this is exactly what they want to hear. That these things supposedly beyond their control don't even matter, and that they can overcome it all with hard work. I agree with the principle of that, and believe strongly in free will, but as I've mentioned, the assumptions of "talent being fully innate" and "hard work beating talent in a fair competition" are both misleading. But although those speeches have it flipped, they are onto something: that we should focus on work instead of talent. That frame is meaningful.

In this article, however, I also want to focus on the other audience in question: those with "talent". Much can be presented to the audience of people who don't feel like they have much talent, and much has been directed to that audience. Here I want to focus on this subject from the frame of that neglected audience of those with strong indication of talent.

As I alluded to, we can change the meaningless "hard work vs. talent" debate to a question about which one to focus on in ourselves. Think of that Aesop fable of the tortoise and the hare, and the conclusion of slow and steady winning the race. This is a good life principle from a few angles, and has an easy tie to this hard work and talent discussion.

The hare: the talent focus

My meaning of "focus" in the context of "talent focus" or "work focus" is aligned with what the actor thinks about, places value on, and uses to contextualize his life.

There are several important implications of being focused on talent. Being focused on talent entails associating one's own worth with talent. It usually implies pride associated with superiority over others, at least on the dimension of that talent; it serves to support one's good perception of themselves. Clearly such focus leads to arrogance and showing off, which then chains to other implications such as having a myopic, short-term focus. It is often intimately tied with insecurity.

Since those who care about talent value talent above other things, they get stuck in pumping up this talent and proving its worth to themselves and others over and over again. These people tend to be undisciplined due to short-term focus, insecurities, and because discipline is quite counter to their perception of their talent (it can be cooler to say to oneself and others that they worked less hard than others and achieved greater things, this can become pathological). And generally those who pamper themselves with their own talent tend to have relied on it in place of the hard work that others were forced to go through, and then end up with little basis for discipline later in life due to lack of practice.

Talent focus can be mapped to the hare in Aesop's fable. Arrogant, needs to prove himself, makes a stunning display of his talent (speed), takes a nap due to lack of endurance (got tired, which occurred to begin with due to lack of serious planning and strategizing) and arrogance and an intent of mockery, gets too comfortable in his nap, and in his sleep is blind to the fact that he is being overtaken, then feels sudden strong panic when he realizes he has been overtaken in the middle of his slumber. Importantly, the hare lost this race.

Having a focus on talent is the source of strong vulnerabilities. In the case of intelligence, for example, several people who show early signs of intelligence, and place a lot of value on it, tend to be extremely insecure about it. Ironically they end up avoiding intellectual challenges because they fear getting the wrong answer, because in that case they would feel exposed to others and to themselves as actually being an idiot. Since they place so much emphasis on talent, their self-worth tends to revolve around it, and there are few things more unpleasant than having that one point of pride attacked by others and by reality itself.

In other cases, a focus on talent can manifest as "true arrogance", where those talented individuals do have a strong belief in their own superiority, and for a while do enjoy success on that front. However, there tend to be bigger fish somewhere in the sea, and there tend to be people who may start off less talented, and who the arrogant talented person beats early on, but who work and practice and learn to grow their own talent, and eventually become more skilled. When the arrogant, yet very talented individual eventually loses for these reasons, their world begins to cave. Like the previous case of the talented yet insecure individual, their main point of validation has now been stomped on, but in addition, they usually have to contend with the pain of once knowing glory and respect and then losing most of it. Once these people lose, they become more likely to lose again due to fear finally kicking in. Those who he once defeated have all the motivation and energy in the world to want to defeat this arrogant show-off, and when they do, he won't hear the end of it. Eventually people forget he was talented to begin with.

To focus on talent introduces a huge vulnerability that is inherently subject to getting poked by the world, by others, and by oneself. There is a much better view to take.

The tortoise: to focus on discipline

The hare may have a "natural advantage", but is disadvantaged by his obsession with it. Looking only at "raw talent" is akin to a static view of life; that the current state is the only thing worth looking at. People get so obsessed with their current talent, at some specific point in time, that they don't hone it, causing them to lose it, or at the very least opening the door for others to usurp their thrones; then it is eventually their turn to be left in the dust. It is important to remember that the hare did not lose because of some intrinsic defect in his ability to race. He lost because there came a point where he stopped racing altogether. Remember, focus on raw talent is analogous to a static view, in other words, a short-term focus, avoiding any long-term responsibility or objective. Since short-term focus is hand-in-hand with the victory of comfort over resilience, as well as defeatism and indulgence, it is no surprise that the hare took a long nap when he started feeling tired. At this point he was out of the race.

While the hare, and everyone like him, is out of the race, the world keeps spinning. Things keep changing, and others keep moving forward, and the hares do not keep up with it. It's not really that they don't move "fast enough", it's that they don't move at all. The periods where they move are rare compared to the long periods where they do nothing and drown in their own indulgence or insecurity; their bursts of energy are dominated by periods of draught and stasis, and thus they end up nowhere near the point of their potential.

Now enter the tortoise, the victor of the race. The tortoise won not because of any talent, but because of his consistency, his discipline. He was able to avoid the honey trap of short-term thinking; if the tortoise was to only think according to that small time horizon, he would have never run the race, thinking to himself, "well, the hare is way faster than me, so there's no point". But during the race, the tortoise just kept on going; the tortoise was probably confident in his inner strength and resolve, and maintained it during the race.

This was only possible for the tortoise because he avoided the snare of "talent focus", which would have immediately taken him out of the running and straight to the bottomless pits of self-pity. The tortoise was only focused on doing what he could (more on this in the next section). And that in itself was far more than what the hare could manage.

Once again, the point is not that "hard work is greater than talent". The point is just to do what you can. The results can be surprising. Talent without any discipline literally leads nowhere, to a slumber.

The tortoise: to not care

One might ask why the tortoise ran the race to begin with. It was great that he won the race and all, but before the race happened, was he not fazed by the hare's incomparable speed? Was it of no worry to him that the hare was inherently extremely likely to win this match?

Well, things like that would only matter if the tortoise wanted to win. Under that frame, I have no doubt the tortoise would have backed off.

The tortoise, however, had a focus not on the outcome, but on the journey. The tortoise cared about virtue: his own strength, resolve, discipline, and consistency. This allowed him to be unaffected by the external circumstance of the hare's speed, and indeed, it ended up working out for him in the end. The tortoise's discipline focus, and lack of alignment with volatile and egotistical outcome, is the only reason he jumped on that opportunity, and the only reason that door of victory opened to him.

It almost seems like a paradox. He who didn't care about winning had the winning advantage. Compare that to the hare, who was so absorbed with the concept of winning, that he made the mistake of wanting to win with style; he thought that taking that nap and then proceeding to win would boost his own glory. And I imagine that when the hare ended up losing, he felt the worst emotional pain of his life; he had so much to lose precisely because he wanted to gain, and his whole life and perceptions revolved around that concept. Whereas the tortoise wouldn't have cared if he lost. The link to concepts in Eastern philosophy is pretty clear.

I'll make another link to a previous article I wrote. The hare is very similar to "readers of books" who are obsessed with their own glory, and end up perpetually far from the truth, and end up missing opportunities that ironically would have helped bolster their own reputations and competence.

Things are not as they seem

I will demonstrate a parallel between the tortoise and the hare, and the section "the glorious fuel of neglect; the importance of everything" in this article.

When people are very focused on outcome, things can be disheartening. People who feel like tortoises wonder why God didn't incarnate them as fast hares. People who feel stupid wish they were smart, people who feel unloved by their parents wish they were more like their constantly secure peers, people who are unpopular wish they fit in, people who are physically weak wish they were strong; you get the picture. But there's a deeper reason that the tortoise won the race. He won because he was not a hare.

Let me explain. The "winning factor" of the race was the tortoise's discipline, pitted against the hare's neglect. Perhaps the tortoise only stumbled upon this concept of discipline because he was a tortoise, because he knew about his slow legs, and knew that these hares are faster than him; maybe that's why he figured out he had to be disciplined in the first place. The tortoise was driven to the concept of discipline because of his "relative weakness", and that extremely important realization made by the tortoise will also positively affect all his other endeavors; discipline is not a "specialized" skill; it is always applicable and always extremely useful.

Now think about the hare. The hare, relying on raw talent, could get away without discipline. In his life he was never forced to try, and was never forced to learn or grow, because he won those races that he encountered early on. The hare never practiced discipline, and being undisciplined comes with a lot of inextricable baggage. When the hare ran the race, he was hit by his lack of discipline. And imagine the agonizing pain he must have felt when he lost. Jarringly enough, the hare was disadvantaged in this race because he did not know discipline, because he never had to. And since he was so used to winning, he was far more vulnerable and affected by loss than the tortoise would have been.

Things are not as they seem; life is unpredictable and intricate, and everything comes with complex associations and repercussions. Disadvantages can be advantages, and vice versa. But as I've said several times in my writing, one should not take the focus of advantage/disadvantage, and symmetrically winning/losing or practical utility, but rather of discipline, aesthetic, and a frame towards nature. From there things resolve themselves, and from there the tortoise wins races before he knows it, races that he would have never ran if he kept thinking from a naive and uninformed view of disadvantage.