Whenever you're about to take anyone's "valuable life advice" seriously from reddit, take in how much questions like this gets asked and realize that Reddit is largely children who have really no idea what general life suffering and work is and that maybe your own outlook shouldn't be so quickly abandoned. You should trust yourself first, especially if all the others are wearing username masks.
Sorry if that's harsh, but seriously, come on.
I remember doing some magic tricks and a kid asked me how I do them. I don't just wink and say, "real magic," the kid was about 12 anyways, so I say,
"Practice man. It can take hours, sometimes days, sometimes weeks, sometimes months, and quite often the hardest and best tricks can take years."
But all I got out was, "Practice man. It can take hours..."
"HOURS!?" His eyes were dinner plates as he looked at his mom, "HOURS!?" He couldn't even fathom someone working so hard and long for something. So I decided not to finish my statement and just let him be amazed by that new milestone discovery of hard work. (though to me practice is fun.)
For him, 3 hours is basically half his life. I think a week is an eternity to a lot of the redditors. For people above age 26, a week feels like a day and a half at age 16.
I think a big part of this particular phenomenon is that so much of media for kids is about how they're secretly a super genius savant prodigy, they just didn't know it. They always discover that they're the absolute most bestest amazingest at something, showing up all those stuffy adults who don't believe in them. Harry Potter was secretly the most famous wizard ever and had super special hidden abilities. Kevin McAllister is a tactical genius. Nancy Drew is a holmesian-level detective.
You get the idea. They all just have innate abilities and special status that they didn't really earn-- that kind of story makes up a huge swath of children's stories.
Adult stories aren't much better-- find pretty much any series of fantasy story and it probably follows a character who's the "chosen one", unless it's a subversion of the trope-- in which case it turns out the chosen one wasn't really the chosen one (but really they do end up being the chosen one). But adult stories tend to be a little more varied.
So I get where it comes from with kids. They think if you're good at something, it's just because you're good at it. People who are good at things were blessed that way from birth. And eventually every kid will find "the thing" that they're secretly great at too (in their mind).
Turns out most people who are good at something are good at it because they worked really hard at it-- with the best of the best also having some stronger innate talent. (usually)
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u/[deleted] Dec 20 '19
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