Talent vs Hard Work. Or as some call it, Nature vs Nurture. No matter what it is called, I think everyone gets my point. Besides, I don’t really care how people want to call it anyways.

Throughout my life till Primary 6, I have always thought that to succeed, hard work is far more important than talent. Even if you are not talented, as long as you put in your heart and soul into something, you will be pleased with the end-result. With that belief in mind, I slogged like crap in primary school. I studied hard, worked hard, to the point when I almost broke down in primary six, but that is besides the point. I managed to get into a great school. Rather, I got into the school that my parents wanted me to go to.

I was aiming for HCI, but I was eligible for RI, and my parents forced me to enter RI. Not that it was a bad choice in any way, but I’m just saying…

Obviously, that immature and silly idea of mine completely fell apart when I entered RI. It was then when I truly felt the pressure of being just a hardworking person while others around you are both hardworking and talented. Or super-talented to the point even if they are not hardworking, they still get brilliant and fantastic results. How shitty is that, isn’t it.

I mean, it is not surprising that RI is a literal sea of talents, especially since the students here are the cream of the crop,  best-est of the best. And this when you are start to feel the wall of being just hardworking and not talented. You can never learn or improve as fast as others. What takes people 5 mins to learn, you take 30. What takes people 1 lesson to understand, you take 3. You find yourself lagging behind, you feel as though you are left behind by everyone else. The whole world is ahead of you, while you just keep struggling to keep their pace. Not a nice feeling, definitely.

Yet, nobody around you knows this feeling. Since mostly everyone is so talented, they are always in the lead. They will never get to experience how it is to lag behind, and how sad, how depressing and how tiring it is to always play catch-up.

All this was still fine for me to handle. I mean, it is more or less about the individual, no? If I am slow and untalented, then sad for me, I will just have to play catch up, right? However, the problem becomes an even greater issue when it is no longer about you, but when you are working with a team.

With a team of talented people, they will of course, without a doubt, do and comprehend things faster than you. That is when the problem comes in. You are a slow learner, you are untalented, which means you have to put in a shitload of effort just to make sure you don’t drag your team down. After all, the strength of a team is as strong as its weakest link. And I am fine with that. I can put in more effort, just to make sure I don’t bring down my team, but after a while, you will realize all this extra work that you are putting is only for catching up. If you give that same amount of time to others, there will be able to much more amazing things than you can do. This is when you will start to feel pissed, and lose the motivation for working so hard. You know life is never fair, but still, you feel angry, sad, depressed, and at times, lonely.

There are also times when things may not be as good as you hoped to be. You have put in 500% worth of extra work, but yet, you are still not as good as the rest. In other words, you failed to catch up, despite wasting so much time, energy and effort. And you know what, others don’t care about the process, they just look at the end result. If you can’t achieve what they want, you are shit, you are junk. It doesn’t really matter how much effort you put in, cause they will never see that, and honestly, they don’t really care too. Or perhaps they never had the need to work so hard in the first place, so they can’t empathise. Either way, you just wasted your time, and nobody gives a damn.

It is quite depressing, no? After four years, my idea of success has changed. Hard work is no longer enough. You will need talent. If you have no talent, and just putting in extra effort like nobody’s business, guess what, you will still suck. You may be good individually, but people will just do a comparison with someone else who has the talent and the passion to put in the hard work, and come to the conclusion: “Oh, that other guy is better. You suck.”

It is sad, but it is true. And the truth always hurts.

This is one of the rare occasions when I actually write such a long and wordy blog post. I guess the trip to my friend’s dad’s house today has somehow made me think about all this…