When Talent’s Promise Buckles Under Its Own Weight
Case Illustration
All names and identifying details in these case illustrations are fictional. They are composite sketches drawn from clinical and coaching experience, not accounts of real individuals.
The burden of living up to your own expectations.
The burden of living up to your own expectations.
When Luka was nineteen, he won a prestigious programming competition with code his professors described as breakthrough. That word had never quite left him. It also vaulted him into a choice job.
Now 33, he is principal software architect of an advanced research group at Astra Systems. On paper, everything looks as if it worked out. In practice, Luka has been waiting for the conditions that would finally allow the fulfillment of his considerable potential. His true gift, he knew, was his capacity for creativity and original thinking. New ideas came to him effortlessly, and his computer had a trove of repositories of works in progress. At this stage in his career, builds and implementations bored him. What he really needed was to be working for a company with more resources, more engineers, more capacity to build out his ideas. Though he worked for a prestigious firm who gave his group considerable leeway to develop innovations, the fact that, for now, his best ideas could only come to fruition by his own labor frustrated him. He often thought about moving over to Google.
He didn’t think of his start/not-finish routine as the expression of an undisciplined or unfocused mind. He thought of it as the best part of him. The seeing-through, the finishing, the grinding concentration required to take an idea from conception to implementation — that was grunge work, lower-order labor, the province of people less gifted than himself. That he had not yet been placed in circumstances to support this division of labor was, in his view, the world’s failure rather than his.
Luka was also aware that his frustration had, over the years, cast a film of depression over him, and eaten into his self-confidence in a way he didn’t care to examine. Although a new fancy could spur him to productivity for a few days, the stimulation did not last long before what was becoming a default of lassitude returned. To keep himself going, he played his favorite video games of childhood. These were soothing and gave his boredom just enough engagement to help him avoid the subconscious worries that were biting at the edge of awareness.
What were these worries? The possibility that the breakthrough at nineteen might have been the peak rather than the prologue. That a gap had been quietly but relentlessly growing between what he believed himself capable of and what he was actually producing. That new ideas would not alleviate his boredom and dissatisfaction, because few ideas got finished. He couldn’t quite allow himself to think these thoughts directly, but nevertheless they were there, a strong undercurrent washing away the sand beneath his positive sense of self.
Forcing himself to think about an upcoming presentation, Luka decided to review what Mei Lin had done so far. Then he took a second look, ran a second simulation. Mei Lin’s code was essentially complete. She must have just recently completed it, since she hadn’t yet brought it to him.
Although Luka felt it wasn’t fair for his boss Amit to expect his group to contribute to an imminent application architecture for the firm, he hadn’t had the energy to make a stand. In any case he sensed it wouldn’t be successful, and did not want to draw Amit’s unneeded attention to his group’s productivity. Fortunately Mei Lin was a workhorse — methodical, disciplined, working things to their conclusion, and fortunately not a self-promoter, which Luka would not have tolerated. She was also easy to work with, with her easy-going and friendly temperament.
Moreover Mei Lin was normal, a real team player, not plagued with the ups and downs of the gifted. What she produced was solid, reliable, competent, if not inspired, he would often tell himself.
Except that this was elegant. Even better — it was essentially complete, ready to be presented to the steering committee in five days.
Luka’s mind raced. For once he allowed himself to be honest and imagine that when Amit saw this, the orbit of gravity could shift away from him toward Mei Lin.
What should he do? She worked for him. The code had been produced on his watch, within his group, under his architectural direction. Wasn’t there a reasonable argument that the work of a team was the work of its leader? He could present it as their joint effort. Or he could just merge the code into his, and tell her he had independently arrived at a similar solution — not inconceivable, given his familiarity with the space. The prospect of taking credit for it was like manna to the hungry, and he felt then that he had been hungry for a long time.
His fingers hovered over the keyboard.
He didn’t want to — would never want to — be a bad guy.
His fingers hovered.
On Brilliance Without the Apparatus That Makes It Productive
Although one is tempted to tack a label, a diagnosis, such as depression or attention disorder on Luka, it would take the focus off the point of his story. A label would not capture the poignancy of his struggle, some of which could be attributed to the inherent temperament each person carries, but also encompasses a complex of choices, habits and conditioning.
Luka had a genuine gift that developed without the scaffolding required to use it: frustration tolerance, the habit of staying with something past the excitement of its novelty, and the cultivation of the discipline of grinding work that turns ideas into things. Brilliance, in other words, without the apparatus that makes brilliance productive.
We need not seek to assign blame — to his environment, his parents, his history, or to Luka himself. We only need to appreciate the poignancy of his stuckness. The tragedy is not that he isn’t talented. He surely is. The tragedy is that he has whiled away years protecting the idea of his talent rather than exercising it — externalizing the obstacles, degrading the achievements of others, keeping the subconscious worries at bay with just enough stimulation to avoid confronting them directly. The story he tells himself — that the world hasn’t yet built the right conditions for what he can do — stands directly between him and his best avenue to change.
He did not want to be a bad guy, and this instinct warred with his hunger for validation. At the finger-hovering moment he could not think that pressing the key could be a threshold crossed into an even deeper challenge to his self-esteem — but he could sense it.
The video games are not the problem. The fingers on the keyboard are not the problem. Both are symptoms of the unexamined gap between who Luka wants to believe himself to be, and the fear of what he is not. The failure to examine that gap has deepened it, and deprived him of a path to close it.
See also: The Impostor Question — the cluster article that frames this territory.