Because thinking is becoming the new gym — and most people won’t even bother showing up.
By FOREVER UNFINISHED, SEP 10, 2025
Imagine being in a bar, and the person sitting across from you is a handyman who confidently exclaims, “Drilling a hole into a wall is a talent you either have or you don’t have!” Wouldn’t you think that person to be deranged — or at least wrong? And how can you be so full of yourself to believe that anybody couldn’t learn it?
Now imagine the same scenario, but the person is a skilled writer telling you, “You’re either good at writing or you’re not.” I’m willing to bet that a lot more people would not feel comfortable contradicting that. Why is that? Writing, as opposed to drilling holes, is an intellectual activity, and writers enjoy an aura of mystery and genius. There’s an assumption that those who can translate the ideas in their head onto paper with clarity and beauty were just born this way. They have a natural talent. Becoming a handyman, on the other hand, is something everyone can learn. I’m 39 years old, grew up in Germany, and I had never drilled a hole into a wall until this weekend. There was just never a need or a possibility. Ever since I left my parents' house, I’ve always lived in furnished rental apartments and made sure not to leave any holes so I could get my deposit back. And I can happily report that it didn’t impact my life in any negative way. But last week, my parents were visiting, and my dad helped me fix a shoe cabinet to the wall. He drilled most of the holes — except one. I asked if I could do that one myself while he supervised. Since my dad is great, he let me. The hole I drilled? Way too big. He looked at it, laughed, and said: “It’s like your grandfather always used to say: ‘I can watch someone hammer a nail into the wall a hundred times, but you have to do it yourself to learn how.’”
Not being able to write well, though? That’s been harder to laugh off. It only became a real problem after high school. I’m not sure if that’s because the stakes at university were higher, or because none of my high school teachers ever really gave detailed advice on how to improve. Probably both. At university, I had to attend an “essay writing” class as part of my undergrad program in American literature. (Why did I enroll in a literature minor if I’m bad at writing? Delusion? Lack of self-awareness? We will never know.) It will come as no surprise to you now that I failed my first at-home assignment and the subsequent ones miserably, even though my friend from high school, who always had better grades than me in English, helped me write it. I thought I was doomed. If I couldn’t do it even with her help, what hope was there for me? Fortunately for me, my teacher — let’s call her Mrs. Peterson — a soft-spoken lady from Des Moines, must have seen teaching as a vocation. She was much more optimistic than I was. She encouraged me to practice. Gave me reading tips. Told me to give myself more time and retake the class the next semester. To spare you the details: I did what she told me to do. And by the final exam, I had written the second-best essay in the class. That was the first time my belief that writing is a talent you either have or don’t started to loosen. Not disappear — just crack a little. I still thought I had gotten lucky, because the exam topic was one I had coincidentally read a lot about. But something shifted. The seed was planted. I didn’t believe it yet, but I was open to believing it.
It wasn’t until five years later, when I had my first job and felt very disengaged — and in search of “what to do with my life since I don’t have a passion” — that I stumbled across Cal Newport’s blog Study Hacks and his book So Good They Can’t Ignore You. That’s where I first encountered the idea of deliberate practice — and the realization that any skill, even intellectual ones, is learnable and improvable. “Why did it take you so long to understand that, woman? Are you stupid?”
Maybe. But maybe it’s also because, except in rare cases, most of us are products of our environment. I grew up in a very average, German middle-class family where a fixed mindset around intelligence was extremely common. In my family, I never really saw anyone deliberately practice something they weren’t already good at. So I could say it’s because of my parents, but it’s not just them. Most of my teachers throughout primary and high school believed the same thing. There was this unspoken rule: You’re either good at something, or you’re not. If you were average at math, teachers wouldn’t tell you to practice and get better. They’d just label you as: * “bad at math,” * “chats too much,” * “not focused.” And honestly? I don’t even blame them. With a classroom of 28 students, why would an average, overwhelmed teacher in a public school focus on the chatty backbenchers — the ones who’d need extra help just to catch up and might not even make use of it? It takes a different kind of teacher — one who sees teaching as a vocation — to help everyone improve. And that idea — that everyone can improve — is, I think, a very American idea. It’s the core of the American Dream: You can become more than you thought you could be. German society, by contrast, was very fixed for a long time. It took two world wars to dismantle the belief that your position in society was automatically inherited from your parents.
These days, I try to remind myself of Dharmesh Shah’s definition of skill vs. talent: A skill is something that is learnable. Talent is the rate at which you can acquire it. If you follow that logic, then yes — someone with a talent for writing will get better at it faster. But that doesn’t mean someone without talent is hopeless. It just means they have to practice more. And if the person with talent doesn’t practice? They’re not getting better either.
I recently came across something Paul Graham wrote that really stuck with me: “Writing is thinking. To write well is to think clearly. That’s why it’s so hard.” He went on to say that in the near future — once most people rely on AI to write and think for them — clear thinking will become rare, like physical strength is today. Most people don’t need to be strong anymore. And only the ones who actively train for it are. He believes it’ll be the same with thinking: only those who keep practicing will stay sharp. My hope is that publishing publicly becomes my version of the gym — it’s always been more motivating to put in the effort when others are doing the same (remember the university library, anyone?). And maybe one day, my writing will be like the holes I wish I could drill: sharp, clean, and to the point without blowing out the drywall.