I know very intelligent people who swear by their inability to learn, say, languages or whatever. Would they succeed if they put in enough effort?
Inability to put equal effort into everything throughout the day reifies into heuristics about which things get the effort/engagement. In principle, if you are going to spend 2 hours on something, why take it any less seriously/playfully during those 2 hours than anything else, even if you are not planning to put 10,000 hours in it in total?
And so you get silly heuristics where you do put 10,000 hours into something, but systematically never do it seriously/playfully, and so never become proficient. It’s not enough to be very intelligent to get proficient at moderately complicated things if you systematically avoid learning anything about them.
Fair allocation of effort that ensures progress requires that the silly heuristics of systematic avoidance of effort are not in total control. This can happen naturally if you are lucky enough that your heuristics happen to be less silly, or if you have infinite energy and motivation and really do habitually put similar effort in everything throughout the day. But if that’s not the case, it’s often possible to take deliberate control of your curiouslity and allocate it in a way where any single thing you interact with a nontrivial amount does get a fair portion of effort.
It’s an obscure enough principle that I’m not sure many people are practicing it, and so any reports of systematic inability to learn something need to account for this confounder of silly-on-reflection systematic avoidance of (productive) effort towards learning a particular topic, that’s not just about the time (let alone discomfort) dedicated to it.
Inability to put equal effort into everything throughout the day reifies into heuristics about which things get the effort/engagement. In principle, if you are going to spend 2 hours on something, why take it any less seriously/playfully during those 2 hours than anything else, even if you are not planning to put 10,000 hours in it in total?
And so you get silly heuristics where you do put 10,000 hours into something, but systematically never do it seriously/playfully, and so never become proficient. It’s not enough to be very intelligent to get proficient at moderately complicated things if you systematically avoid learning anything about them.
Fair allocation of effort that ensures progress requires that the silly heuristics of systematic avoidance of effort are not in total control. This can happen naturally if you are lucky enough that your heuristics happen to be less silly, or if you have infinite energy and motivation and really do habitually put similar effort in everything throughout the day. But if that’s not the case, it’s often possible to take deliberate control of your curiouslity and allocate it in a way where any single thing you interact with a nontrivial amount does get a fair portion of effort.
It’s an obscure enough principle that I’m not sure many people are practicing it, and so any reports of systematic inability to learn something need to account for this confounder of silly-on-reflection systematic avoidance of (productive) effort towards learning a particular topic, that’s not just about the time (let alone discomfort) dedicated to it.