"Crafting a life worth respecting is hard work!"

“It’s Not Talent; It’s Just Work!” ❤️

Annie Dillard | Born: 30 April 1945

Professor Annie Dillard, offers a radically different perspective to our understanding of the word, ‘Talent’, in this particular essay titled, “It’s Not Talent; It’s Just Work!”.

A life-transforming essay, that gives us the importance of the words, ‘commitment’ and ‘consistency’ to what we do, that makes us really ‘talented’.

Says she –

People often ask me if I discipline myself to write, if I work a certain number of hours a day on a schedule. We want to believe that other people are natural wonders!

People can lift cars when they want to. People can recite the Koran too, and run in marathons.

These things aren’t ways of life; they are merely possibilities for everyone on certain occasions of life.

You don’t lift cars around the clock or write books every year. But when you do, it’s not so hard.

It’s not superhuman.

It’s very human.

You do it for love.

You do it for love and respect for your own life; you do it for love and respect for the world; and you do it for love and respect for the task itself.

Crafting a life worth respecting is hard work.

What is it that sets apart the people we hold up as examples of brilliance, goodness, or grace?

They are not somehow better or more than us, they just did the hard work.

Maybe it makes us feel better to think our heroes and inspirations are supernaturally gifted so we can assure ourselves we are somehow less.

Every one of us has the capacity for greatness. 

It does not take talent, an expensive class or degree, to be born under a lucky star, or anything at all but our own willingness to make something of our lives from the raw material we are given.

So I maintain that the people who have made something of their lives - the Pasteurs and Cezannes and Melvilles - were neither more talented nor more disciplined nor more energetic nor more driven than the rest of us.

They were simply better educated.

Some of them did it the hard way, studying all the difficult works of their fields at home on their own. Others studied in school.

If I had a little baby, it would be hard for me to rise up and feed that little baby in the middle of the night.

It would be hard; but it certainly wouldn’t be a discipline.

It wouldn’t be a regimen I imposed on myself out of masochism, nor would it be the flowering of some extraordinary internal impulse.

I would do it, grumbling, for love and because it has to be done.

Of course it has to be done. And something has to be done with your life too!

Something specific, something human.

But don’t wait around to be hit by love. Don’t wait for anything.

Learn something first!

Then while you are getting to know it, you will get to love it, and that love will direct you in what to do.

So many times when I was in college I used to say of a Course like Seventeenth Century Poetry or European History, “I didn’t like it at first, but now I like it.”

All of life is like that - a sort of dreary course which gradually gets interesting if you work at it!

Now, for the homework part 😊

Dear reader, I want you right now to think of any famous personality, whom you know so well, and whom you consider so highly talented!

As a second step, I want you to simply try and figure out, what in your opinion makes you consider that person highly talented?

Done? Well, Now, you go ahead and give your definition of the word TALENT! ❤️