I would love to be a painter. Even a good sketcher. A decent doodler. I have plenty of appreciation for art that really captures a moment well—that invites you to share the wonder or the pain in a face, or the windswept endurance of a place—but I can’t do it myself. My pen on paper can create lines that are just about recognisable, but I know people who can translate the full magic of a moment into brushstrokes, and I’m in awe of that skill. I don’t understand how their fingers can move with such confident precision and grace. And yet, in another way, I do understand—this is the result of practice. I’ve seen enough to know how it works. The skills that appear the most effortless are the ones that come from hours and years and maybe decades of hidden effort.
In this world, there is no end to the skills that could possibly be developed in all directions—from coding to cooking to quantum entanglement—but I’m beginning to realise that the impressive skills I admire most in others are consistently built on other skills that are much easier to overlook. Skills that are available to everyone. The longer I live, the more I’m convinced that there are really just a few key skills that unlock all the others. Take reading, for example. If you learn to drink deeply from other people’s thoughts, your mind will constantly be flooded with new ideas, perspectives, and knowledge that will feed into everything else you do. There are other key skills, like learning to listen well, but the one skill that I’ve seen with the most power to take raw potential and make it become actual reality is just this: the ability to work hard. Proverbs 21:5 says,
“The plans of the diligent lead to profit
as surely as haste leads to poverty.”
Natural talent can give you a head start, but it can’t finish the race for you. Opportunity might be the wind in your sails, but if you haven’t trained yourself to pull the ropes it will only mess up your hair as it passes you by. If you want to become good at things—at anything at all—you must first become good at work itself. You must learn the skill of doing hard things over and over again, when you want to do them and especially when you don’t want to do them. You must train yourself in the mundane art of starting. You must patiently increase your capacity for endurance. You must develop the determination necessary to force yourself to finish. I’m not saying that you should drive yourself into the ground—rest is a gift from God, and we need to acknowledge our limitations and dependence on the Lord. But work is a gift as well, and if you can learn the skill of working hard, every other skill will be in your reach.
sethlewis.ie 