20 Year Belief

Opening lines of Emerson's Self Reliance:

"To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men, — that is genius. Speak your latent conviction, and it shall be the universal sense; for always the inmost becomes the outmost — and our first thought is rendered back to us by the trumpets of the Last Judgement. Familiar as the voice of the mind is to each, the highest merit we ascribe to Moses, Plato and Milton is that they set at naught books and traditions, and spoke not what men, but what they thought. A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within, more than the luster of the firmament of bards and sages."

Except I never dismissed those thoughts. The new column by Amit Verma states every thing I believed for 20 years and that belief was cemented more last year after reading Michael Gladwell's Outliers.

Genius is hard work. Innateness of talent is an illusion and that illusion is so popular since it feeds our cognitive fluency. Yes, some are born with special talents but that doesn't automatically make one a genius. Behind every genius, there is a story of immense hard work, pain, sacrifice and that famous 10,000 hours of slogging. After reading Outliers, the first men who came to mind were my childhood idols Sachin and A.R.Rahman.

"The 10,000-hour rule might seem a bit pat, in terms of the number itself, but the general principle, that hard work matters far more than talent, is one I find credible. Look at our own geniuses, here in India: Sachin Tendulkar might have been born with a special talent, but the most memorable stories of his younger years are those that speak of his hard work: he would spend hours at the nets, perfecting his cricketing reflexes, and would get his coach, Ramakant Achrekar, to ferry him around on his scooter from one match to the other so he could play as much cricket as possible in a day. Another genius, AR Rahman, was a keyboardist in Ilaiyaraaja’s troupe at the age of 11, and played and arranged music for a number of bands in his youth. At the time Roja released, in 1992, he had been in the music business for 15 years. I suspect if you ask them to comment on this, they would agree that if you take away the toil, the 10,000 hours, they would never have made it here."

Sachin is my fundamental attribution error. For those who don't follow cricket (or born in a cricket playing nation) cannot even begin to comprehend what he is about and the humbleness that oozes out of him. But thanks to his music, one can easily connect with Oscar winner A.R.Rahman. Last lines of his Oscar acceptance speech says it all:

"All my life I had a choice between hate and love. I chose love and I am here."

Here is my favorite song from his first movie Roja:







and this melancholic Lathika's Theme: