The Day I Stopped Trying to Be Talented

It was the first time I got any good at anything

Image created by author Musharaf Khalid

For years I treated my work the way you treat a message you are half reading.

Music playing. Phone face up next to me. Three tabs open, one of them nothing to do with the thing I was supposed to be doing.

I gave it maybe forty minutes of real attention spread across four hours, then wondered why I was still average after two years.

I used to think the missing piece was talent.

Some people are born with the thing and the rest of us just show up.

In my case it wasn’t talent.

I was simply never fully in the room.

The day that changed, I did something small and a little silly.

I put the phone in another room, sat down and worked on one thing for an hour without checking anything.

One hour.

I was bored by minute twenty.

And that hour was better than the whole week before it.

So I did it again the next day. Then most days after that.

Six weeks later the thing I had been stuck on for two years finally moved.