> Despite all of the caveats above, my belief is that it's easier to become relatively good at real life activities relative to games or sports because there's so little delibrate practice put into most real life activities.<p>> You're probably 99%-ile, but someone with no talent who's put in the time to practice the basics is going to have a serve that you can't return<p>I have a soft spot for this kind of insight because it is supposed to be inspiring and I know I should take it in that spirit, but one thing that's always bothered me is the contradictory assertions that on the one hand, almost no one deliberately practices, but on the other hand, this makes it "easier". How can both assertions be true? Any sensible definition of difficulty has to consider how many people succeed at it. If very few people succeed at a task in practice, <i>it is a difficult task</i> no matter how "easy" it looks in theory.<p>I've come to see passion & motivation as indistinguishable from "talent". Having the passion & motivation to put in the effort is part of one's "talent" and realistically is not that easy to change. Everyone knows that to write well, you need to practice writing a lot. Scott Alexander notes in his Parable of the Talents [1] that he never needed to really muster up the energy to practice writing a <i>lot</i>:<p>> I know people who want to get good at writing, and make a mighty resolution to write two hundred words a day every day, and then after the first week they find it’s too annoying and give up. These people think I’m amazing, and why shouldn’t they? I’ve written a few hundred to a few thousand words pretty much every day for the past ten years. But as I’ve said before, this has taken exactly zero willpower.<p>I've found this to be true in a lot of walks in life. While there are certainly people with genius intellect/ability, most of the "talented" people I meet aren't of that kind, they are just effortlessly more motivated or passionate about something than I am. For example, they often started programming when they were 10 or something and spent most of their childhood choosing to do little side projects instead of the normal variety of childhood time wasters.<p>I think this essay's (95%-ile is not that good) thesis is roughly this: to be good at something, you just need to care a little, because most people don't care at all. Just need to care a little, that doesn't sound so hard, right? All I want to say is yes, in my experience caring even a little is <i>so, so hard</i>. There's a reason why most people don't care at all and that reason is probably not "you're better and more special than most people as a reader of this essay".<p>[1] <a href="https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/01/31/the-parable-of-the-talents/" rel="nofollow">https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/01/31/the-parable-of-the-tal...</a>