How Our Hidden Talents Go Unnoticed In A Result-Focused World
Short, light newsletter. Asymmetry between the result and the process. Son wants to bury me in the garden. Do cell phones make us stupid?
While walking León, my youngest son, who is a year and a half, I remembered an idea that I come back to from time to time: we tend to focus on the results, which are often visible to all, but we are rarely witnesses of the process. We are quick to judge a finished book, a free-kick goal, the end of a university career, but we pay little or no attention to the hours of writing, the training needed to improve a shot or the years of study.
We see the final picture — Messi with the World Cup, Marta with the Ballon d'Or, Jon Fosse with the Nobel Prize for Literature, or Matthew Perry dead — but we have little idea of the path each one has taken to reach that moment.
This simplification of reality is disproportionate. While each one of us lives every day involved in their own processes — which almost no one else sees — those on the outside judge one-off moments outside of their context.
It applies to a movie star or a parent: they see that your child — or you see someone else's child — bite someone and a sentence is passed immediately: “The parents don’t take care of that kid.”
And I say: does anyone think if those parents can — because of their emotional, intellectual, cultural and economic resources — take care of their child more or better than they already do? To make matters worse, this can become a stigmatizing sentence for the child (“here comes the child that misbehaves”).
At the same time, until you reach a result, you may feel anxious if something is not materializing, i.e. coming to a visible conclusion.
It happened to me last week coming back from physiotherapy. I have been trying to recover from an injury to my right foot for four years (not even the doctors can explain what I have, why should I be able to?)
Sometimes it seems that my foot gets better but it never becomes clear that I will be able to run again without pain. The utopia of running my second marathon in Athens moves further and further from me. Will I have played my last soccer game back in December 2019?
In addition to the — almost inexplicable — lack of a solution for my foot, what became clear in my mind as I was driving home was this contrast between the outcome and the process. At one point, a pickup truck closed in on me. The person on the passenger seat was a guy in his 30s. A few meters ahead I overtook the van and was surprised to see that a woman was driving, very confidently. Why did she catch my attention? Why had I assumed that a man was driving?
One thing is the process of wanting to modify macho cultural structures and another is the result: an impulsive thought uncovers a deeper bias.
It also happens to me with parenthood: some months ago I finished a (paid) work project and I went back to taking care of my two children — who are 5 years and 20 months — and of the house. When I say it like that, it seems superficial.
If I go into detail — the exercise of patience, the complexity of not working as I did all my life, the inability to meet the permanent demands for play or attention — it is often boring, except to women who are or have been in the same situation. I lack more men around who are going through my same experience.
Invisible talents
But actually, what I really wanted to do (don’t ask me why) was to start off this newsletter mentioning those things that I am good or even very good at, and that very few know about. It's a bit embarrassing to talk about one's supposed talents, but these are skills that are somewhat invisible.
I'm sure you too have a talent that you're proud of but that few people know about, don’t you?
For example, I'm good at reheating stale bread and making it taste and feel like it is freshly baked (one key is to moisten it with water before reheating it). The same with pies, which taste like they are fresh out of the oven. I'm not talking about that horrendous reheating in the microwave that leaves the food with parts boiling and others cold, without any crunch and almost rubbery rubbery. No, I'm a food-reheating sybarite: when I touch it, food looks and tastes just as good or better than freshly made.
I also tend to be good at propagating some plants. The latest accomplishments were two lavenders, four rosemaries and a succulent: it gives me even more satisfaction that I started them all with a very small piece of a mother plant I saw lying around and liked. The offspring of all of them are now huge specimens, which I propagated even further (the succulent became four large plants).
Something that also gives me pleasure — yes, pleasure — is to recover carrots and potatoes that others would not hesitate to throw away because they are soft and even start to blacken: just peel them and leave them in a container with water in the refrigerator. In a few hours they will be in great shape again. Try this trick and let me know. You’re welcome.
It also gives me great pleasure to restore a piece of furniture or to give a second or third life to a piece of wood I pick up in the street. There are many shelves, desks, stools and bookcases at home that I created. I love it when somebody asks me where I bought them and I boast that I literally took them out of the trash.
Wasted time?
This week I did very badly with screen time: it went up 36% from last week, so I spent an average of 3 hours and 37 minutes a day looking at my phone (I didn't use the computer for a minute).
To my credit, there's an average hour a day that went between Google Maps and Spotify — that is, it wasn't goofing around on the Internet or reading news but using an app to get somewhere or to play an audio story for my son Lorenzo. It doesn’t make me feel better that the global average of screen time is around seven hours per day.
Unless I am doing a specific task, such as writing this newsletter, I would like to spend no more than two hours a day in front of a screen. I'm more concerned about the issue with my two children, who at the moment hardly use them but are still young.
“It Sure Looks Like Phones Are Making Students Dumber”, headlined The Atlantic in an article about how the use of smartphones and other digital devices affects students’ academic performance.
Pediatric neuropsychologist Carina Castro Fumero quoted the article on Instagram, noting that:
students who spend less than an hour a day on digital devices scored 50 points higher in math than those spending more than five hours
students' well-being began to decline around 2012, coinciding with smartphones and social media turning into a focus for teenagers
nearly half of OECD students feel “nervous” or “anxious” when they don’t have their devices nearby, and this “phone anxiety” is negatively correlated with math scores.
Battle in sight
My partner Irene and I can claim victory in this initial battle with the screens. We don't have a TV at home and Lorenzo, who is five, watches movies, which we choose together, once or twice a month. And from time to time, a few minutes of videos on my phone: he is fascinated by Maradona's legendary warm-up. I showed him some of Cuti Romero's saves (he is considered one of the best defenders in the world. Yes, he is from Argentina.). And of course I also showed him the penalties against France that got Argentina the last World Cup (#YoArgentino, sorry).
Obviously he asks for much more than what we give him. I know that as he continues to grow up, this unequal fight against the screens will be more challenging, among other reasons, because his life will have more and more external influences. But well, one day at a time.
In the meantime, what we’re trying is for him to be more connected to other experiences and activities — social life, sports, leisure —, so that when the time comes, Lorenzo will have alternatives to choose between a screen and other habits he has already developed. We will see.
Beyond the moments of tiredness and exhaustion that sometimes become very intense, the days with Lorenzo leave me with many smiles and phrases of his, which will be what I will remember most in the future.
Like this one: “When I grow up I will live with you. And when you die I will bury you in the garden at home,” he told me the other day, while brushing his teeth. It was just like that, spontaneous, out of the blue (for me). Evidently, there is much more going on in his inner world than I can perceive. And yes, one thing is what appears on the surface and another is what goes on the inside of his expanding brain.
Thank you for making it this far.
So much for today's newsletter, which must have been the most vain and cloyingly optimistic, right? I hope you won't be offended, and if not, let me know.
As you may have noticed, I’ve started publishing every other week in English (instead of once a month). This is also the frequency I have in Spanish. I would love to hear if you like that.
Many thanks to those who share the newsletter and welcome to those who keep trickling in (you can find the archive of all the past editions of Recalculating here).
See you in two weeks!
With love,
Nacho
🙏 Many thanks to Worldcrunch for translating and editing this newsletter.
