I’ve noticed that I always end up teaching the short story. It isn’t like I’m into the short story all that much. I definitely don’t do any scholarship on it. Any course that I design, however, ends up being based on short stories.
I thought about this and I know what’s happening. My students are bright, hard-working, dedicated but they have zero staying power. Unless I give them something new every day of class, they grow so listless that they’re almost catatonic.
Another quality they have is the constant need for exuberant, over-the-top praise.
My sister notices the same tendency amongst the Millenials she tries to place for jobs.
The problem is, however, that success in any area whatsoever is predicated not on brilliance or talent but on a cast-iron ass and love of patient plodding.
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“The problem is, however, that success in any area whatsoever is predicated not on brilliance or talent but on a cast-iron ass and love of patient plodding.”
So true! Natural ability will only get one so far and then you have to actually put some real effort in. I see it at uni all the time, the successful students are the ones that make this transition. I am not sure it is just a millennial thing though, it took me a while to realise I needed to actually work hard and that was about 30 years ago.
The need for over the top praise definitely is new. In my day a simple “well done” would have been enough praise for a whole year.
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Good encouragement for me to keep on plodding, though I doubt it will do me very much good except for perpetuating a certain kind of life.
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My reason for ending up with short story is language skills. Not sure millenials really are this way although I do, of course, know the type to which you refer.
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It took me years to develop the staying power to succeed.
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“The problem is, however, that success in any area whatsoever is predicated not on brilliance or talent but on a cast-iron ass and love of patient plodding.”
This mirrors Gasset when he talks about the suitability of “mediocre science”. Not everyone could be Dirac, but many could still do useful things through iterative means rather than innovative means.
The real problem is that most of what is generally considered to be success is iterative, and what isn’t iterative comes from individually formed opinions about what should work and what shouldn’t that together lead to rewarding risk taking.
If you are constantly looking for validation, it is abundantly obvious that you don’t hold any strong opinions about the worth of your work, and generally this will show in its quality.
As Paul Arden said famously, it isn’t about how good you are, it’s about how great you want to be.
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Great science can also only be created as a result of decades of plodding.
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