Hello, Habits

by Fumio Sasaki

  Age eleven meant her maximum heart rate would be about 209. And it increased to 207 when she reached the finish line. That meant she had run mostly at full speed. Reflecting on that day, Lawler said:

  “You gotta be kidding me! Normally, I would have gone to that girl and said, ‘You need to get your ass in gear, little lady!’

  “I started thinking back to all the kids we must have turned off to exercise because we weren’t able to give them credit. I didn’t have an athlete in class who knew how to work as hard as that little girl.”

  Running at a fast speed is different from doing your best. Whenever I read this anecdote, the tears start to fall. The girl who wasn’t good at exercising had practically been crushing her chest putting in more of an effort than anyone else in her class.

  Talent interpreted through habits

  A professional writer is an amateur who didn’t quit.

  —Richard Bach

  Through learning about habits, my idea of what we call “talent” has also changed. I, too, used to think that talent was something that you were given in advance. I thought it was tied closely with genes and distributed at birth, and that some people have it while others don’t. I used to feel that I, too, had been born as someone who didn’t have it, and believed that it was really unfair.

  But I wonder why that belief is so common. Successful people are sometimes said to have no natural talent, and they sometimes declare so themselves.

  Don’t geniuses have talent?

  Naoko Takahshi was the women’s marathon gold medalist at the Sydney Olympics. Yoshio Koide, Takahashi’s instructor, reportedly always told her: “You don’t have talent. That’s why you have to train the hardest in the world.”

  You’d think that no matter how you look at it, you need talent to be a gold medalist, right? Kyohei Sakaguchi, an author I mentioned earlier, puts it like this: “Some people say to me, ‘You have talent; others are different,’ but ten years ago, they said, ‘You don’t have talent, so you should quit.’ Isn’t perseverance amazing?”

  Haruki Murakami also thought, until age twenty-nine, that he’d be content living a quiet life and enjoying casual pastimes. All was fine as long as he could read, listen to music, and own a cat. He said in an interview, “I didn’t even think at the time that I might be able to do something creative. I didn’t think I had that type of talent.”

  Were Einstein and Darwin just ordinary people?

  Geniuses always say, “I’m ordinary.” Charles Darwin lamented in his autobiography that he didn’t have the capacity for intuitive understanding or memory.

  Einstein also said that he wasn’t particularly smart; he simply tackled problems for longer periods. If Darwin and Einstein weren’t geniuses, then who is?

  Darwin said that if he was better than ordinary people by any measure, it would be his ceaseless passion for natural science. This is Einstein’s reasoning: “I have no special talents. I am only passionately curious.”

  Neither considered themselves particularly capable. But both possessed inexhaustible passion. That’s why they were able to tackle tough problems for long periods. In other words, simply continuing was more important for their success than capability.

  Isn’t talent, then, something not distributed at birth, but rather grown from something that wasn’t there to begin with?

  Talent isn’t rare

  Anson Dorrance is a soccer coach with the greatest number of wins in the history of US women’s soccer. He’s achieved twenty-two national victories in thirty-one years, and he says talent isn’t something that’s rare; whether or not you can become a great athlete depends on the effort you’re willing to make to develop your talent.

  The reason his teams achieve glorious results isn’t his ability to identify and recruit only people with talent; instead, he makes the players who join his team work hard.

  The simple truth about talent

  The vision of a champion is someone who is bent over, drenched in sweat, at the point of exhaustion when nobody else is watching.

  —Anson Dorrance

  Earlier, I introduced conclusions drawn by the sociologist Daniel Chambliss, who studied top swimmers for many years. These are the findings in one of his papers:

  •The best performance is the result of accumulating countless small skills.

  •There is nothing special or superhuman about what the athletes do.

  •Athletes achieve outstanding results through continuous effort.

  What this paper says is terribly ordinary: the ones who keep working diligently come out ahead. In fact, this conclusion seemed so ordinary that it wasn’t well-received by his colleagues.

  People expect more provocative arguments, like “Genes decide everything!” or “Your early education determines whether you become a genius!” But the truth is simple: the diligent continuation of habits creates talent.

  The reason why geniuses say they don’t have talent, or that they’re ordinary, is that the procedures they follow are so very straightforward.

  Setting yourself apart from geniuses

  Genius is a convenient word. If you say genius, people will probably think you’ve been managing with just the talent you were born with, without even making an effort.

  —Ai Fukuhara

  It’s always stories about geniuses that we admire. The perfect performances put on by figure skater Yuzuru Hanyu and gymnast Kohei Uchimura once every four years make them look like geniuses of another dimension, and we like getting excited by their splendor, becoming enraptured, feeling a sense of unity with them.

  Angela Duckworth introduces concepts, like the following from Nietzsche, that explain such a tendency: When we see something that’s too perfect, we don’t think, “How can we be like that?” It’s because there’s no need to feel inferior in comparison when you think of a genius as a divine existence. “That person is superhuman” means “it’s useless to compete.”

  In this way, words like “talent” and “genius” aren’t used to praise someone, but are instead used to separate them from us.

  When we see capacities that we can’t compete with, rather than considering talent an extension of the efforts that we make, there’s more relief in believing that it was generated at a place beyond our reach.

  The talent to add, and the talent to multiply

  If the question becomes whether it’s possible for anyone to become a genius, as long as they continue to make an effort, then I have to say that that certainly isn’t the case.

  In the same way that we differentiated between “effort” and “endurance,” I would also like to differentiate between “talent” and “knack,” which is contained in the term “talent.”

  The poet Machi Tawara says there’s a “talent for adding” and a “talent for multiplying.” Even if people start with the same level of experience, there are those who can only build their skills through addition and those who can quickly multiply their skills to achieve even greater results.

  The difference here is what I would like to call a “knack.” This is the distinction between knack and talent:

  •Knack: A natural ability or predisposition for a certain skill, which helps you to acquire it quickly.

  •Talent: The skills and capacities that you acquire as a result of continuing to do something.

  For example, there are people who can quickly learn a foreign language, and we can say that they have a knack for it. When you have a knack for something, there is a rapid rate of skill development compared to the amount of effort that you make. But even if you don’t have a knack for something, shouldn’t it be possible to eventually arrive at the same skills and capacities, or “talent,” with addition, if you continue to make an effort without giving up?

  There are many who have become proud poets because they have been devoted to polishing what were far inferior talents in themselves.

  —Sangetsuki (“The Moon Over the Mountain”)

  What we have at the outset are only small vari
ations in our knacks. Let’s say that there is a child who quickly picks up the tips during drawing class, and is praised, “You’re good at drawing.”

  Because there’s a reward—receiving praise—when a good picture is produced, the child will be happy and continue to draw. He’ll doodle in his notebook during class. A sense of self-efficacy—“I can do it!”—will be generated, and he might show hand-drawn manga serials to his classmates. He’ll receive even more praise and continue to draw even more. Because he draws often, his skills will get better and better.

  The child might eventually want to apply to attend an art school. But he’ll be shocked to learn that there are many people in the world who can draw just as well as he can, if not better. Among that multitude of talent, he’ll likely receive less and less praise for his drawings, which will mean less reward, and that may lead to less motivation to draw. The less practice he gets, the less improvement there will be, which can lead to the line, “Oh, gee, I guess I didn’t have talent.”

  Even if you can only build talent by addition, your skills will accumulate, as long as you continue to make an effort. But when you see the speed with which someone who has more of a knack than you do accumulates their skills, you may think that what you’re doing is silly, and quit. Isn’t this more a case of your skill development halting simply because you stopped working at it, rather than a lack of talent?

  To give up is to make something clear

  God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference.

  —Reinhold Niebuhr

  Of course, it isn’t as if everyone can become a professional or first-rate. There’s always a limit, somewhere along the way. As William James said, “trees don’t grow into the sky.”

  It’s said that Dai Tamesue wanted to win a medal in the one-hundred-meter run, but switched to the four-hundred-meter hurdles after considering his physical condition. There are things that you can’t change, like the fact that you weren’t born in Jamaica or that you’re not two meters tall. So Tamesue gave up the hundred meters. But he says that giving up is “making something clear.” He didn’t just walk away; he made clear what his limitations were.

  Being convinced, even if you get sick

  That’s what I want to do: learn my limits, and learn my prospects. To gracefully give up, or make those clear. I want to expose my limits and be truly satisfied with them.

  Illness might be a straightforward example. At present, I get plenty of sleep, cook three meals a day, consume brown rice and vegetables, and exercise every day. I don’t drink, and I don’t smoke. I would get straight As in a medical interview sheet, and there’s nothing else for me to do in watching my health.

  Still, I may get sick someday. I think I’ll be able to willingly accept it then—because I’ve done everything that I could. Illness would become one of my limitations, and I think I’d be able to concede to it.

  You can forget about a word like “talent”

  This is where I recall words by Sō Takei: “Talking about someone’s talent can wait until you’ve exceeded the effort that that person has made.” A young child tries to button his shirt several times, but can’t do it. What would happen if he then started to think, “I have no talent to button my shirt”? What if he saw an adult handling the series of actions that make up a normal morning routine and thought, “He’s a genius”?

  We similarly use the word “talent” as an excuse to give up on challenges for which we have no way to know how far we’ll be able to go, way before we’ve actually reached our limit. We say we “don’t have talent,” and that’s why we’re giving up.

  There are differences in our knacks, and there must also be differences in our limits. But that’s something we can think about much later, after we’ve continued to work on our habits. There should be no need at all to talk about talent in our daily lives.

  How about genes?

  Talent isn’t something that we’re given, it’s something that’s created as a result of continuation. But aren’t the genes that we inherit from our parents involved? Of course they do have an impact.

  As an example, the relatives of the musician Kenji Ozawa are tremendously impressive. Ozawa himself graduated from the University of Tokyo, his father is a scholar of German literature, his mother’s a psychologist, the conductor Seiji Ozawa is his uncle, and many of his other relatives are also famous people. When we see an example like that, it looks like he was born in a class of his own to begin with, and naturally, that’s partly true.

  But if your relatives include a professional in a certain field, there should be less objection, within your family, for you to go into that area yourself, compared to other families. It should also impact your sense of self-efficacy to know that if your relatives are skilled in that area, you should be able to do it as well. How are we supposed to measure that kind of impact with genetic testing?

  The answer to “genes or environment?”

  My advice to other disabled people would be, concentrate on things your disability doesn’t prevent you doing well, and don’t regret the things it interferes with.

  —Stephen Hawking

  Is it genetics that makes a person, or is it the environment? A consensus is starting to emerge for this long-debated, complicated issue.

  Canadian psychologist Donald Hebb has answered that asking that question “is like saying that the area of the field depends more on its length than on its width.” And my favorite response is what Walter Mischel said:

  “Who we are emerges from a tightly intertwined dance between our environment and our genes that simply can’t be reduced to either part alone.”

  It’s more effective to think potential is infinite

  Snoopy said: “You play with the cards you’re dealt.” Cards that you’re dealt include your knacks and your genes. But through habits, it should be possible to exchange some of your cards, like in a game of poker.

  Psychologist Carol Dweck has ascertained something important. In a test on willpower, people who thought willpower was without limit did better than those who believed that it would decrease if you used it to complete a task. Putting aside whether or not willpower really does decrease, it was more effective to think that it didn’t decrease.

  I think the issue of talent and genetics is exactly the same. At the very least, there’s no doubt that people who believe there’s a lot of room for change can reach farther than those who think that most everything is determined by genes.

  Is it simply that I have a high level of self-awareness?

  In practicing my habits, there was a time when I wondered if I simply had a high level of self-awareness about what I was doing. A friend of mine saw me give up liquor and sweets and said, “Your lifestyle ain’t for me.”

  The psychologist Barry Schwartz divided people into two types: Those who are satisfied with the radio station that they’re listening to now, and those who continue to change stations looking for something that’ll satisfy them.

  The former are “fairly satisfied”; they can be satisfied in their shopping if they find appropriate clothes. The latter are “perfectionists” who look for the very best outfit, and they have trouble buying clothes.

  I think I fall completely under the latter category. Perfectionists feel joy if they find something that will satisfy them, but the psychological and physical price they pay for finding that “something” is high. When in full pursuit of an objective, one’s happiness can be completely neglected.

  I get depressed right away when I can’t practice my habits. People who are like that can be said to have high expectations for themselves.

  There are those who appear happy, even when they don’t seem to excel at anything in particular. There are those who always wear a happy smile on their faces. I really think that talent and happiness are completely unrelated. It’s my belief that you don’t need to tell people who are already happy to acquire good habits or to make mo
re of an effort.

  The greatest reward is the ability to like yourself

  Don’t ask yourself what the world needs. Ask yourself what makes you come alive and then go do that. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.

  —Howard Thurman

  There are words said by a young actress that I can’t forget: “I can like myself when I hustle.” While various rewards may be obtained by successfully acquiring a habit, I think the maximum reward is a sense of self-approval, to be able to like yourself.

  One day, I was looking at Twitter and something jumped out at me—a tweet from @eraitencho: “Isn’t a goal that’s effective for most people ‘to become a person in a good mood’?”

  I’m basically a person who is frighteningly laid-back, but I still get excited when I’ve accomplished all my daily habits. I can get in a good mood when I have the sense that I’ve done the things that should have been done today.

  When things go well and I’m in a good mood, I can cheer on other people as they make their own efforts. When things aren’t going well, I want to take it out on others. When I’m absorbed in whatever I want to do, it doesn’t bother me much what others do; it’s like I don’t have time to deal with it.