When trying actually makes a difference

Part I, Chapter 7 cont'd

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From my book, Unsolicited Advice: A Consent Educator's (Canceled) Memoir, only on Substack.

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In college I had to take Symbolic Logic to complete my Philosophy major. I bombed the first two tests. I started going to the study groups and working a lot harder at it. The curse of the gifted child sometimes is that when you’ve gone so much of your life never having to study, it’s easy to throw your hands up and say fuck it when something requires hard work. It reinforces the myth that there are people who can just do stuff, like drawing, singing, painting, acting, when really I believe the people who succeed are generally the ones who practice their craft consistently and frequently. You can in fact learn to draw, sing, paint, and act so long as you really want to and you have just a little seed of talent. You don’t have to be born great in order to be good.

Before the next test, I spent an eight hour day studying in the Hungarian Pastry Shop on 110^th Street, down the block from my apartment between Broadway and Amsterdam. I focused, I drilled down, and I did it. I got good. I learned. I think I got a B+ on the exam and I was delighted.

A few years later, before I graduated, my dad told me on the subway, “I think you now know that you can do anything you want to do.” He stressed “want.” I think that’s the key: desire. If I want it, I’m already closer to it than most. The reverse of that is I’m far from things I don’t want. For example, I have no desire to be a basketball player or a doctor, so I probably wouldn’t be very good at them. If I wanted to do those things authentically, I would likely be pretty good at them. The desire tells me I’m already part of the way there. And generally, I think the seed of talent is what causes us to light up at the prospect of doing the thing, so if you feel lit up, you likely have the seed.

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Props from my upcoming musical, Squirm: A True Story. You can see a staged reading at Scribble in Los Angeles on March 4, 2025.