"I'd say that hard work and natural talent is 80:20."
That was said in response to my question about talent. And I told him 80:20 I'd give it to him. I wanted to say talent is purely derived from hard work but I decided that's a little too extreme a statement to make.
Which then struck me: What is learning? When I was reading Plato's dialogues, there was this interesting philosophy that knowledge is eternal and ever-present. Whatever we think we have 'learnt', we have already knew them from the longest of time. It was said that the soul is eternal and knowledge is already known, all that is to be done is to refresh the memory. I put 'learn' in inverted commas because I think it's an abstract notion.
Think about how one 'learns' something. A book can tell you the theory. Your teacher could teach you the steps. Yet the "easiest" way of learning is when you already "knew" the answer. Imagine the times, say, when you solve a mathematical problem. You have no clue what the book or the teacher is saying. Nevertheless you went to try it yourself via brute force. Incidentally you arrived at the answer the exact same way as your book's method. Delighted, you mentally took note that you got this problem right and you have now "learnt" how to solve the problem. Yet, where did the "learning" occur? The book did not help. Your teacher could enlighten you. The answer was already in your head, somehow. Is this true learning? One cannot discount that this is still knowledge acquired, if that is how learning is going to be defined. Is this what people call natural talent? If a person could, via brute force, somehow "know" how to do it without actually understanding anything from any external source time and again, one could say such people are gifted because naturally they can learn without much guidance.
Consider another type of learning. I call this grinding. Similar to the above, you have no idea what is going on. You tried to do it via brute force. Unfortunately, you aren't as lucky as the group of people described earlier. They knew the answer; you don't. Instead of giving up, they tried again and again, trying to "learn" what was being taught to them. They could emulate it perfectly after putting in hours after hours of repetitive practise no less. Or they could slowly discover the answer after they prod it from all sorts of different angles. The start is the same. The end point is identical but the process is very different. Such people are what I call a genius of hard work. Personally, I think this is the true learning. Learning should be defined by the process. The second group, albeit slower, they actually "learn" more as they go on a journey of discovering the answer in comparison to the first group who just got it.
Jordan once said the best players take what the defence gives them. One might not get it instantly but the process of learning is the truly priceless one. There is a limit to how much one could get. If you believe Plato's philosophy, then there is no limit to how much knowledge you could get by refreshing your memory when you keep trying and trying.
