My son was born recently. What talents might he carry? What role will they play in his life? But there is one more layer to this question. By the time he is grown, we will likely live in a world where AI does most of the cognitive work. What will talent even mean in that world — and what will effort mean? Thinking about this, I found myself revisiting a question I’ve carried for years: the relationship between talent and effort, the cruel structure that lies between them, and how that structure changes after the singularity.

The Price of Effort

Effort costs time. But with talent, you reach the same goal faster. Repeat the experience of getting results with little input, and a baseline forms in your mind: “This much effort should be enough.”

This is the moment the blessing of talent turns into the curse of “good enough.”

Psychologists call this the fixed mindset trap. The more you have leaned on talent, the more you read struggle itself as proof that talent is lacking. So when results don’t come quickly, you leave the path. The greater the talent, the greater the odds of falling into this trap.

Why can’t talented people see how little they actually invested? Because they have nothing to compare against. They never got to watch how long an ordinary person has to hold on for the same goal. Not knowing that their “two months” equals someone else’s “several years,” they remember those two months as a full effort.

The Birth of the Opportunist

As this misperception accumulates, a strange dataset builds up: “I tried hard, but nothing came of it.”

There is an old law in behavioral psychology: behavior without reward dies out. Talented people stack up memories of “I invested and failed” without ever having invested enough. Once those memories cross a threshold, effort itself gets filed away as a risky bet. They didn’t learn from failure — they learned the belief that effort is pointless. A variant of learned helplessness.

The result: they become opportunists chasing only short-term rewards. Opportunists wait for waves. Catch one by luck, and they mistake it for the fruit of their own strategy. But a strategy drunk on short-term wins eventually collapses in the face of real volatility.

The Conditions for Greatness

Of course, not every talented person ends up an opportunist. The fork in the road is a single question: have you ever experienced long effort paying off?

Take a child gifted in math. School exams fall without much study. So far, the world of short reward cycles. Then comes a math olympiad, and for the first time, a problem that won’t yield for months. Give up here, and the opportunist’s path begins. But endure those months and crack the problem, and a different belief forms: “Hold on long enough, and it works.”

That belief snowballs. One success becomes confidence for the next challenge; confidence enables longer bets; longer bets return as rewards. The Matthew Effect. People inside this virtuous cycle don’t leave success to luck. They design structures that don’t lose.

The Cruelest Truth

But there’s a problem. Getting that first success experience is itself a matter of luck.

Why could that child endure those months? Maybe there were parents cheering nearby. Maybe a friend wrestling with the same problems. Or maybe there was simply nothing else to do at the time. Either way, these are conditions willpower alone cannot explain.

Even diligence — even the will to try — is decided by the luck of parenting, genetic temperament, and social environment. When successful people say “I got here through my own effort,” they conveniently omit that the conditions enabling that effort were never theirs to choose.

In the end, “the ability to exert effort” is itself a kind of talent. And like every other talent, it is distributed unequally. The reason it’s hard to rise from the bottom isn’t just the lack of money. It’s the absence of any environment that could instill the conviction that holding on pays off. Where only failure has been learned, effort can only feel like a dangerous gamble.

The Illusion of Grit

So far I have cast the strength to endure — grit — as the protagonist of this story. But let’s take one more step. Where does that grit come from?

Watch people who hold on for a long time up close, and something odd appears: they often don’t think they “endured” at all. Look again at that child stuck on a problem for months. Did the child really grit their teeth through it? Or did they simply love the problem — too curious to put it down? What looks like grit from the outside may have been enjoyment on the inside. An old line from the Analects points at exactly this spot: those who know it are not equal to those who love it, and those who love it are not equal to those who delight in it (知之者不如好之者 好之者不如樂之者).

Enjoyment bypasses the reward cycle this whole essay has been worrying about. Grit is needed because rewardless stretches exist. But for someone to whom the process itself is the reward, those stretches don’t exist at all. The road others call a desert, they stroll. For a person who has found a domain that fits their taste, effort is not a payment — it’s a consumption.

So should we skip grit and go find our taste instead? Not so fast. Enjoyment has a fatal flaw: it doesn’t last. On any long road there comes a stretch where the fun evaporates. The plateau where skill stalls; the finishing stage where only repetitive work remains. People running on enjoyment alone stop here and leave for the next fun thing. The dilettante, forever drifting after taste. The hedonic version of the opportunist.

Lack, the Engine Underneath

So we go down one more layer. If enjoyment pulls, something underneath pushes: lack.

The memory of going unrecognized. The pressure to prove something. Something that never got filled. Lack doesn’t evaporate the way enjoyment does. I said earlier that behavior without reward dies out — but behavior pushed by lack slips past that law, because its reward comes from inside, not outside. Every step forward pays down a little of an inner debt, and that feeling is the reward — so the fuel doesn’t dry up even when the world isn’t watching. It’s why creators who last through ten obscure years usually run not on optimism but on “it can’t end like this.” It is no accident that so much great work begins from a wound.

Earlier I wrote that the ability to exert effort is a talent distributed by luck. Now we can name that luck more precisely: the taste some environment instilled, and the lack some environment left behind. Grit isn’t a power fallen from the sky — it’s closer to a symptom, the outward trace of these two engines. What we measure as “grit” may be an effect, not a cause.

Of course, lack is no cure-all. It is the strongest fuel and the most dangerous steering. It makes you pick problems that promise to soothe the wound instead of problems worth solving. It keeps moving the goalposts, because arriving never fills the hole. The end of that road is often burnout.

So here is the hierarchy I’d propose. Lack chooses the domain, taste runs the daily loop, and grit is the backup device that covers the stretches where both fall silent. Lack without enjoyment burns you up; enjoyment without lack drifts; grit without either doesn’t last.

Beyond the Singularity — The Rules Change

Now it’s time to pick up the question I set aside at the start. This is about the world my son will actually live in.

Everything so far rests on one premise: talent means cognitive ability, and effort means spending time honing it. Once AI crosses the singularity, that premise collapses.

There was a time when a fast-calculating child was called a “math prodigy.” After the calculator, mental arithmetic stopped counting as talent. AI repeats this across all of cognition. Coding, writing, analysis, design — in every domain that took years to master, AI now produces above-average output instantly. Cognitive talent becomes a commodity.

So what remains?

Say two people have access to the same AI tools. One finds an answer to “What should I build with this?” and pushes in an uncertain direction for six months. The other pokes around and drops it in a week: “Not worth it.” Their cognitive abilities are identical. What made the difference wasn’t coding skill. It was the two engines we just saw.

Talent in the AI era gets redefined into three forms.

The talent to question. AI produces the answers. Deciding which problems to solve, which questions are worth asking — that stays human.

The talent to curate. The eye that picks what is beautiful and valuable out of the flood of AI output. Machines generate; humans select.

The talent to refuse. The strength to turn down the faster road AI offers and insist on your own direction.

The common denominator of the three is one thing: the ability to endure boredom and uncertainty. And as we just saw, the substance of that ability is not clenched teeth — it is taste and lack. If IQ once determined class, in the AI era this becomes the new class capital. AI can take over cognitive labor, but waiting without losing purpose remains a human job.

The shape of effort changes too. Old effort meant repeating a defined skill to build mastery. Four hours of piano a day. Thousands of lines of code to develop a feel. The path was fixed, so you could count on “this much input, this much progress.” Effort in the AI era is different: exploring which problems are worth solving, trying, failing, correcting course. The path itself is uncertain, so reward cycles grow longer and more erratic.

And here a cruel paradox appears. As AI pushes the cost of execution toward zero, the threshold for “trying” disappears. Anyone can build an app, write, start a business. But easy entry speeds up the expectation of reward. “I built it in a day with AI — where are my results?” The short-reward-cycle addiction that once afflicted only a talented few now catches everyone. An era where people feel they’ve “tried hard” after two days, not two months.

In the end, AI doesn’t dissolve the paradox of talent — it democratizes it. A world where anyone can fall into the talented person’s trap. Opportunists wait for waves; great trees grow roots. The waves of the AI era come so often that those without roots will drift every single day.

The polarization of perseverance begins. And the survivors won’t be the ones who clenched their teeth hardest. They’ll be the ones who found a domain they don’t need to endure, and who carry a reason they cannot put it down.

The Question That Remains

So what can we do?

If faith in effort is decided by luck, then society’s role is to build environments where that luck can be engineered. Two directions. First, the chance to be exposed to enough domains for taste to catch. Second, inside those domains, a ladder of growth where “I did it” can be experienced again and again — reward cycles designed to be bearable. The real reason it’s hard to rise from the bottom is that both are missing. And in the AI era, even the shape of that ladder must change: not a ladder of mastery, but a ladder of exploration and direction-setting.

I don’t know what world my son will meet when he grows up. At first I thought a father’s job was to design small successes calibrated to his clock — challenges sized to what he can handle, with small rewards to match. Now I think one step comes before that. Before designing rewards: finding, together, the domain where his time flows differently. The domain where he forgets the clock. The road he can stroll while others call it a desert. Lack cannot be designed by a parent — and should not be. But the odds that taste catches are a function of exposure. And inside a domain where taste has caught, the ladder of success experiences works at a fraction of the cost.

In fact, I am proof of this myself. In 1990, living in a single rented room, my father bought a computer for his five-year-old son. He could barely use one himself. But that exposure was where my taste caught — and more than thirty years later, I still live inside that domain. The domain where my time flows differently is not something I found. It was discovered in a spot my father laid out for me. I wrote that story separately, in My Father’s Technology Timeline.

If there is one thing I can pass on, it is neither talent nor grit. It is the experience of having searched for the domain where his own time flows differently — and of having stayed there a long while. And that experience is something someone can help him find. Just as it was found for me.

References

  • Carol Dweck, “Mindset: The New Psychology of Success” (2006)
  • Angela Duckworth, “Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance” (2016)
  • Nassim Nicholas Taleb, “Fooled by Randomness” (2001)
  • Michael Sandel, “The Tyranny of Merit” (2020)
  • Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, “Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience” (1990)
  • Alfred Adler, “Understanding Human Nature” (1927)