Wednesday, June 13, 2012

Can Kevin Durant or LeBron James Truly Appreciate Their Own Talents?


Everyone has gone through something like this:  you take on some new challenge like playing chess or the piano. You work hard at it because initially two things are true: a) when you see other people who do it well you sense the feeling of pride and satisfaction you would have if you could do it well too, and b) at the beginning you cannot yet do it well. Then after lots of hard work finally you can do it too. But somewhere along the way something changed. Mastering it meant discovering that it’s not such an impressive feat after all. Now that you can do it you see that there is a method to it, it’s not magic like you thought.
Could it be that the causality actually works in the opposite direction:  those skills that you eventually do master, you master them because you stop thinking of them as magic as start to think of them as routine methodical tricks.
Is it even possible for someone to be great at something and be in as much awe of himself as the rest of us failures are of him?
Read it at Cheap Talk
Success Is Wasted On The Successful
By jeff


Last night I sat in awe watching Kevin Durant take over the first game of the NBA Championship and steal away victory from Lebron James. I was certainly not alone in this feeling and may have even been joined by others on the court (whose individual talents are masterful in their own right). I often assume that holding a talent at such an extremely high level must be incredibly satisfying, but is this true? Can Durant (or James) appreciate their own greatness to the same degree as the millions of others who don’t have those skills? Or has the act of mastering certain skills dampened the feeling of success from doing so?

No comments:

Post a Comment