my take on talent

My next post was going to be my insightful and illuminating political-economic analysis of PM's NDP Rally Speech. Unfortunately, my attention has been sidetracked by some other blogs and IM conversations about talent and marriage, so I shall write my take on that first. And I'll analyse the speech some other time if I ever get down to reading it.

When I was a little primary school kid, I had this entire series of Chinese short story books. My mother used to pay incentivise me fifty cents for every book I read. So I read a fair number, but my Chinese is as crap as ever. Of all the numerous books I read, only one story remains in my mind to this day, 20 years later.

There was a little boy (I forget his name, let's call him Xiao Ming like all other boys in primary school) who was very bad at math. He wanted very much to be a good student. One day some aliens came by in a UFO and said they could help him. (If this narrative seems disjointed, I'm sorry - I don't remember the story that well.) He told them how he wanted to be good at Math, so using their incredibly advanced ET technology they performed an operation directly on his brain. And as promised, he became a great math student. Unfortunately he soon discovered that he had lost his skills at table tennis, because apparently you can't have everything.

So the moral of the story is that you shouldn't trade a useful skill like a sport for something useless like Math. I think I can relate to this because I'm good at table tennis and suck at math.

Lack of talent has always been a bugbear to me. I know I'm probably above average in most things I've tried in my life, but at the same time I've never ever risen to the pinnacle of anything. And most of all, much as I like music, I could never ever develop enough skill at any instrument to play for the enjoyment of others. Oh, and my singing is even worse. So even though I'm pretty good at other stuff like academics and sports, I've never been able to shake off the feeling of being a lousy jackofalltradesmasterofnone. Nevertheless, I've come to terms with my normality because seriously, would you rather be Joe Average or an autistic savant?

It's like that saying I always hear - "life is fair". Most of the time I hear it, it refers to girls. If she sounds good on the phone, she must be ugly. If she looks good from the back, she must be ugly from the front. If she has a good figure, she must be ugly. My, there must be a lot of ugly girls out there. With talent, it's a bit different. Everybody gets to make a personal choice what aspect of themselves they would like to develop and if you choose to play computer games instead of musical instruments or sports, or read comics instead of books, you have to live with your choices - even if they didn't seem like such a big deal back then. A good friend lamented to me once that he had wasted all his time playing computer games - imagine how good he could have become at the guitar or at something else, if he had spent his time more wisely? Of course, this same friend is still getting straight A's at a top engineering school. He also made more money from selling Everquest equipment on eBay than from his internship at Accenture. It's not exactly a sustainable career, but no sympathies there.

So everyone is talented in their own ways and there are usually tradeoffs to be made. There is no way your can measure one person's net worth against another - it's true that some people are worth more money, but is Mother Teresa any less a person than Bill Gates? This brings me to marriage and what I'm looking for in my ideal partner. Just like everyone else, it would be nice if I could find a partner who is good-looking, smart, sporty, rich and of course with a great personality thrown in. It would be nice to find someone with all that and more, but the most important thing is to find someone I can respect. And being a guy, the hardest thing is finding a person I can respect, while at the same time not feeling marginalised or inferior in comparison, because the male ego is fragile.

So it's wonderful that everyone has their own strengths, so I can probably find someone who is a talented musician worthy of my admiration and yet remain secure in the knowledge that I am still better at other more important skills like programming or foosball and hence worthy of reciprocation. That's when I can start a happy family.

Of course, every so often you run into someone special. Apart from playing four instruments, she went to the top US engineering school (so she is smarter and her programming is better), was head prefect and on the tennis team of a top girls school (so she is better both with people and sports) and she still manages to be pretty and have wonderful personality. That's when you realise that life is really not fair and you better try something else like cooking.

And here's my own take on the peanut thing: I can measure my self-worth in muah chee powder.