Being Labeled as Untalented

“You should not take this job,” a friend told me years ago. It was incredibly demanding and impossible to meet all the demands from this friend’s perspective. I would not be able to maintain work-life balance and would sacrifice everything for that job.

She is right. I’m an intense person. I go hard. I go all in, and I want to feel, at the end of the day, like I gave each life endeavor everything I had and left nothing on the table. I never want to feel like I could have done better as a marathon runner (at least in terms of effort). I have been told, by various coaches, mentors, teachers, and friends and colleagues over the years that they have never seen someone work as hard as I do.

This comes as a surprise to a lot of people after they first meet me. I present outwardly as extremely calm and chill with a voice that never really gives off a ton of emotion. On first impression, I never seem very excitable or like the kind of person who would express a lot of happiness or anger. That is not to say I don’t feel very intense emotions, because I do. However, it just does not come out that much outwardly. On job interviews, I sometimes worry that this outward presentation, which I cannot control, sometimes gives way to me just seeming like a standard candidate who does not stand out and isn’t excited about the job. Even when I feel like I’m overly rude to someone or raise my voice, I will apologize, only for that person to say, “What are you talking about?”

This disconnect causes me some dissonance because whenever I am recognized or given accolades for accomplishments or recognition, people often say I am extremely calm, particularly in the K-12 education space, where it can feel like there is a lot going on and there are crises 24/7. This comes as a surprise to me because I certainly don’t feel like I’m super calm or chill all the time. I won’t panic, but I do press on with a never-ending sense of urgency like I’m bouncing from crisis to crisis all the time, but there is also a disconnect between that calm presentation and being recognized for extreme hard work.

But the reason I work and go as hard as I do isn’t just because of my upbringing, but because of how I was seen as an athlete throughout my career. As a marathon runner, I have always been told I am not very talented. I was someone who needed to work twice as hard to be as good as other athletes. I was someone who could build a ton of endurance but did not have the speed. This meant that my ceiling was capped as a runner, and to be just as good as some elite runners, one day, I would need to work extremely hard.

Something important to know about track teams on the distance side is that the runners seen as more talented tend to get funneled into the faster middle distance events, like the mile, 800 meters, and 1,500 meters or mile. The runners seen as not having as much speed get funneled into distance events like the 5,000 and 10,000 meters. One side is seen as more talented than the other, and there is a lot of truth to this: speed is naturally associated with natural talent and something where you can just get off your couch and automatically have. Endurance is something you build and work hard for over time.

A lot of this messaging was confirmed when I didn’t perform well as a runner. When I tell people my personal bests, they tend to be really impressed. But I feel like I have only reached a fraction of my potential and ambitions. I have run 4:36 in the mile, 9:52 in the 2-mile, 15:36 in the 5k, 33:03 in the 10k, 1:13:51 in the half marathon, and 2:35:40 in the marathon. I think I have done better on the roads, after college, than I have on the track, but I still feel like it’s not enough and I dream every day that these personal bests are better. One rather trivial goal I’m going for is running a personal best in the 800. I have run a 2:05 800 meter in relay splits, but I will try this weekend to run faster than that in the 800.

In high school, my cross-country team had a slogan of “Hard work beats talent when talent doesn’t work hard.” Of course, the pushback was always: what happens if talent works hard?

But I realize, after several years, that I unnecessarily pigeonholed myself. I had talent, and I should have realized that instead of thinking I had to get by on sheer hard work. Recently, my friends have told me they have been impressed by my ability to push myself beyond what most other people are capable of doing. But that extreme hard work has been a gift and a curse.

I spent several years working very hard, but I did it while also shooting myself in the foot. I went sleep-deprived for a very long time, thinking it was what I had to do to get everything done while in high school and college. It was frustrating, sometimes, to work so hard only for it not to work out. I realized that I was pushing myself too hard, and that I would go out too fast in races instead of pacing myself and being more strategic.

My problem, I realized, was that I was beating my head against the wall without thinking about it. It wasn’t that I lacked talent, but that there was a balance and medium. I couldn’t go 100% all the time — I realized I needed to go 80% or 90% of my maximum capacity all the time, and put in that 100% effort only when it really mattered, to save my best for the most critical moments. It meant I would stop workouts if I was pushing too hard, that I might stop the workout one rep early if I was pushing the line beyond what would be beneficial. It has taken 15 years of trial and error to learn this, but saving my 100% effort and ability to push myself extremely hard for the moments that count.

Overall, I have found talent to be an amorphous and abstract notion that isn’t as fixed as people think it is. Maybe it doesn’t exist, and there’s a part of my lived experience that tends to think there’s no such thing as talent. But maybe talent is just a more fluid and dynamic concept. There are times when I start studying for a class when I have no clue what’s going on at all. After studying for months and going to class every day, I might finish at the top of my class. I will have no clue what’s going on for a very long time, only to have everything click at some point. That was what my whole last semester of law school was like — I started my first year of law school averaging B+’s, and in the year and a half since, I have averaged above a 4.0 GPA. It wasn’t that I wasn’t good at law school, but learning some systems took some time to activate that talent for oral advocacy and learning to read dense and high-volume information and take what was the most important.

I think we see hard work and talent as two very mutually exclusive things. But what I’ve found isn’t that I’m this being with no talent and who needs to work hard at everything. I sense there has always been some threshold, some point where you work hard enough and the talent might click. It might be latent, hidden deep beneath what was never expected, but I think everyone has that talent deep inside.

In another domain, I never thought I was a very good reader and writer growing up. I thought I was good at math and terrible at reading and writing. In elementary school, this made sense. After all, I’m Asian, so this was the stereotype. English wasn’t my first language and I learned it when I was four years old, so I had an inherent disadvantage compared to even my Asian peers who were great at reading and writing. I was even considered for English as a Second Language classes in elementary school until my parents pushed back, and advocated for me to be held to the same standards as my peers.

In middle school, I developed social anxiety and constantly second-guessed myself in every social situation and overthought every encounter with a peer or teacher. It wasn’t until middle school that I would reach my potential as a reader and writer and catch up when I would tap into my ability to put my emotions on the written page and turn my overthinking nature into an asset instead of a liability. By high school, I tested into honors and advanced placement classes in English. Writing became a passion and solace over the next decade and now, I write every day and have won awards and developed a substantial audience and readership, so believing I wasn’t a talented reader and writer when I was younger was just wrong. Because I loved to write and found catharsis in doing so, I got much better at it.

By contrast, I was very good at math growing up and universally recognized as very talented. I was constantly ahead of grade level. I learned multiplication and division much earlier than my peers. I won an award in elementary school for one of the best math students in class. I could ace tests and quizzes without studying for math at all. But as you can imagine, that came back to bite me eventually. I would continue to flourish through geometry, algebra, trigonometry, and probability and statistics. But the moment I had to take AP Calculus and then multivariable calculus, I struggled and hit a wall. In college, I hit a very similar wall. I didn’t know how to improve because I never struggled with it in the past — I was just a fixed asset no matter how hard I tried.

According to David Robson at BBC, many employers have a naturalness bias, where they have greater respect for those with an innate gift than those who had to strive for their success. This could result in interviewers preferring a less qualified candidate if they believe their achievements arose from natural talent compared to a more accomplished candidate who demonstrates grit and determination. The reason for this is that people prefer goods in their “original state,” according to author Malcolm Gladwell, rather than a manufactured product. And this is often a perception of non-conscious processing, according to Chia-Jung Tsay, an associate professor at the University College London School of Management. So while our society messages the importance of hard work, there is a lot of bias around thinking talent is more important, which has troubling implications with gender stereotyping around talent.

Beyond that, I’ve always thought that hard work was more important. After all, you can control how hard you work, but you can’t control how talented you are. But both are critically important factors.

Over time, however, I have seen friends who have been pegged as distance, endurance, slower, and untalented guys become very good at speedier events like the 400 meters, 800 meters, or mile just by being in very good shape at the long distance. We often thought of speed and strength as two entirely distinct phenomena — but in reality, they were not.

I’m realizing I do have talent as a runner, and a lot of it has been nice to think about and internalize. But it’s not the dealbreaker. A month ago, I ran a four-minute personal best in the marathon and placed fifth in the race. I did it through not just hard work, but long-term, consistent training. I averaged 60 miles a week for about six months. It was the most mileage I ran over that long of a time period ever. Of course, I wish I knew this sooner, but the answer was so simple: the key to getting faster at the marathon was just running more miles — who would have thought! Of course, there were a lot of caveats and nuances there too — it required a lot of workouts and long runs, occasional weeks of rest, nutrition, and other elements, too. It requires luck in not getting sick or injured. I realize that many areas of life function in a very similar way, and the hard work has to be combined with consistency to see rewards for that labor over time.

I know so many of us have been told we are not talented, and that we have to work extremely hard to flourish or even get by. I think the intent behind that messaging can sometimes be well-meaning. Hard work does beat talent when talent doesn’t work hard. Hard work is, most of the time, more important. Hard work is seen as within our locus of control — talent is not. But even those of us who are untalented just haven’t activated our inherent potential and talent yet. It requires long-term sustainable work, but we all have talent and should not believe our potential is capped.

I, for one, would prefer to still be seen as the hard worker and the untalented one. I think there is danger in our societal messaging around talent because it’s seen as a “you have it or you don’t” kind of thing. I want to prove the doubters wrong. I want to surprise people. But above all, I want to surprise myself.

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This post was previously published on MEDIUM.COM.

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