How 'The Karate Kid' Ruined The Modern World
August 10, 2021 7:57 AM   Subscribe

"We have a vague idea in our head of the "price" of certain accomplishments, how difficult it should be to get a degree, or succeed at a job, or stay in shape, or raise a kid, or build a house. And that vague idea is almost always catastrophically wrong."
posted by warriorqueen (84 comments total) 26 users marked this as a favorite
 
Effort shock. Man, how true. I try to instill this point about effort as a parent, while not being too discouraging. It’s tricky.
posted by Don.Kinsayder at 8:03 AM on August 10, 2021 [10 favorites]


I’m not sure if this made or ruined the article - last line says, “I know what will make us feel better:” and there’s just a huge blank space where a photo? a gif? a meme? is supposed to show? But just a huge white space. Nothing was probably going to make me feel better after reading that quite depressing read. Which I read while the page jumped around on mobile, dodging ad overlays and reloading various distractors.
posted by amanda at 8:12 AM on August 10, 2021 [11 favorites]


Effort shock is a good phrase, but the rest of this is pretty half-baked, even for a piece on a website which is a spin-off of a Mad Magazine clone.

Chosen One narratives seem like a better target for this. Daniel wasn't one of those, he struggled and got his ass-kicked throughout The Karate Kid, trained over the course of months (after already having gone through some schooling before the movie started). And he only wins because of an illegal kick, as we all understand at this point.

On the other hand, Star Wars strikes me as a much worse offender of this general idea, and much more broadly influential on the culture. Luke doesn't even bother with a training montage before leading the final assault on the deathstar. That was literally his first time piloting a fighter!
posted by skewed at 8:12 AM on August 10, 2021 [22 favorites]


I'm getting a big "your connection isn't private" warning when I try to load the link, is it cached somewhere else accessible?
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 8:13 AM on August 10, 2021


This is a strange article to pop up just after the Olympics.
posted by OHenryPacey at 8:13 AM on August 10, 2021


"If I work this hard, this many hours a week, I should have (a great job, a nice house, a nice car, etc). I don't have that thing, therefore something has corrupted the system and kept me from getting what I deserve..."

I mean, is this wrong? We should not accept a world where people working full time can still live in poverty. Hell, no one should be living in poverty. I notice that this was written in 2010; I think we've moved onto a better understanding of systems beyond personal responsibility since then.
posted by airmail at 8:14 AM on August 10, 2021 [57 favorites]


[The] last line says, “I know what will make us feel better:” and there’s just a huge blank space where a photo? a gif? a meme? is supposed to show? But just a huge white space

The blank space at the end was meant to link to this Rocky 4 training montage video, this is just a decade-old article so it's using Flash to link that, which has since died.
posted by CrystalDave at 8:14 AM on August 10, 2021 [14 favorites]


This is why, to be good at something, you have to enjoy the process and care zero about the final result. Because there is no final result. Just progress. So enjoy the ride!
posted by mono blanco at 8:14 AM on August 10, 2021 [29 favorites]


airmail: "I mean, is this wrong?"

Yes, because he's laying the blame at the feet of regular schmucks like us, not at the boss-level schmucks who really created the crises.
posted by adamrice at 8:18 AM on August 10, 2021 [12 favorites]


I mean, what is the takeaway here? That you will literally never, ever be able to have decent living conditions, some savings, a clean home and a tolerable job because each and every one of those things demands so incredibly much effort that you basically could maybe have one if you started young?

I really thought this was going to end with "and because individually achieving a dignified life is so hard, we need collective solutions; also, it is no coincidence that the people with better lives started off richer".
posted by Frowner at 8:18 AM on August 10, 2021 [29 favorites]


There are lots of things I am expert at that did NOT take 10,000 hours. They are just really, really easy things, like getting a Word table to do what you want it to. I am also terrific at scratching my cat's ears just the way that she likes.
posted by jb at 8:20 AM on August 10, 2021 [24 favorites]


Oops, I did not see the date before posting - it popped up on my Twitter feed. I was inspired by a conversation yesterday with someone frustrated at not getting a black belt in 18 months, not by the need for UBI.

And for me personally, I do think that the culture I consumed as, particularly, a teen, led me to some vague calculus that has proven incorrect, especially around things like talent being hard wired and people who are good at things finding The Right Teacher and everything going a-ok.
posted by warriorqueen at 8:24 AM on August 10, 2021 [11 favorites]


"We do these things not because they are easy, but because we thought they would be easy."
posted by AlSweigart at 8:30 AM on August 10, 2021 [91 favorites]


I agree with the article for things like karate and not for things like capitalism immiserating everybody but this line made me a laugh: "If those dominoes hadn't fallen in just the right way, instead of Editor of Cracked I'd be behind the counter at Denny's, getting wrestled to the ground by cops because I don't actually work there."
posted by joannemerriam at 8:33 AM on August 10, 2021 [20 favorites]


I retain hope that future seasons of Cobra Kai suddenly pivot into a kind of sci-fi/supernatural/light-horror joint where a research team discovers the Valley's obsession with and incredible training results in karate is due to some kind of dimensional portal, and the kids and their senseis have to explore it. Using karate.

Failing that, it could certainly be a John Dies At the End sequel.
posted by Drastic at 8:35 AM on August 10, 2021 [5 favorites]


Can't believe they didn't link to montage.
posted by BrotherCaine at 8:36 AM on August 10, 2021 [4 favorites]


That was literally [Luke's] first time piloting a fighter!
Wedge Antilles (Red 2) : That's impossible! Even for a computer.

Luke : It's not impossible. I used to bullseye womp rats in my T-16 back home, they're not much bigger than two meters.
Lucas skipped the whole training montage with a single line of dialogue. And some midichlorian handwaving.
posted by JoeZydeco at 8:37 AM on August 10, 2021 [27 favorites]


I think there is also a critical difference between, say, becoming an elite athlete/artist/whatever and, like, making a living wage. It's one thing to take your first swimming lesson after watching the Olympics and imagine you might make the relay team after a couple months (or even a couple years) of practice. Or start teaching yourself the piano via YouTube and think you might have a reasonable chance of turning into Glenn Gould by Christmas. That's the Karate Kid lie.

It's something else to work your fingers to the bone for years on end and think that by doing you might just feed and house yourself and your children without going into devastating debt. When that fails, it's perfectly justifiable to believe this system is rigged against you because it absolutely is.

I have zero hesitation in saying that the only reason I have enjoyed any success or security in my life is because of connections, coincidence and pure dumb luck.
posted by thivaia at 8:44 AM on August 10, 2021 [31 favorites]


That was literally [Luke's] first time piloting a fighter!

I thought the R2 units mostly did the flying or at least did the autopilot stuff to keep them from crashing. I always liked that about Star Wars, GI Joe cartoons, and 'The Rock' movies - like everyone can just fly a fighter jet or helicopter in addition to their other skills.
posted by The_Vegetables at 8:45 AM on August 10, 2021 [2 favorites]


Lucas skipped the whole training montage with a single line of dialogue. And some midichlorian handwaving.


At the risk of pushing my glasses all the way through the bridge of my nose, a T-16 is a personal speeder, not a fighter.
posted by skewed at 8:47 AM on August 10, 2021 [14 favorites]


Maybe Karate Kid was completely accurate and it was just that the Cobra Kai fighters were also really under-trained and the whole movie was a bunch of kids fighting like inexperienced dorks.

The best way to disabuse yourself that a particular thing is easy? Try to do it.
posted by gwint at 8:49 AM on August 10, 2021 [5 favorites]


I like the idea that Cobra Kai barely knew how to do any karate, they were just a bunch of jerks who liked their bad-ass karate gi's. They probably only had one 45-minute lesson every Tuesday afternoon. Daniel practices for a month or two, and he can hold his own. The takeaway lesson: most everyone is mediocre and just faking their way through life, you just gotta try a bit and you'll be mediocre too!
posted by skewed at 8:55 AM on August 10, 2021 [38 favorites]


The best way to disabuse yourself that a particular thing is easy? Try to do it.

Tell that to the one-in-eight guys who think that they would be able to score a point off Serena Williams.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 8:55 AM on August 10, 2021 [19 favorites]


Bah!

For one thing, Daniel says that he took some karate lessons previously. More importantly, he's not beating the Cobra Kais in a street fight where he'd be beaten mercilessly because they all outweigh him by 50 pounds. It's a tournament where points matter, not damage. He lands some blows that barely faze his opponent, but score points. Daniel wins because he's fast, skinny, hard to hit, full of adrenaline, and totally focused on surviving, not showing off.

Also, Mr. Miyagi is a wizard. A wizard did it.
posted by Chronorin at 8:56 AM on August 10, 2021 [10 favorites]


Yeah, I thought this article was going to be about literally the opposite of what it turned out to be - the fact that you can put in all the work, the 10,000 hours of practice, and still end up with the short end of the stick, that the work is necessary but not sufficient, and that while in the movies the success comes because of your innate moral goodness or magic or The Force helping you out, in the real world the success often comes from luck, in particular the kind of luck that comes from starting out in a position of privilege.
posted by Daily Alice at 9:03 AM on August 10, 2021 [15 favorites]


While it’s true that movies present skill acquisition in an unrealistic manner, it’s also worth remembering:

1. Almost nothing in your life will ever require you to have expert-level skill.

2. For most skills even a couple weeks of training will give you a significant edge over people who have zero training, and there are a great many skills where 95% of the population have never attempted any training at all.

A couple weeks of dedicated practice won’t make you an expert at most things but it will likely make you notably more competent than the next guy. Which for most things is good enough.
posted by Parasite Unseen at 9:08 AM on August 10, 2021 [42 favorites]


I learned to juggle in an afternoon. I learned not to throw pins with ONE good clunk to my head. On the other hand, I have been washing and waxing my car for close to 40 years and still cannot do a lick of Karate.
posted by AugustWest at 9:29 AM on August 10, 2021 [8 favorites]


If it weren't for Dunning-Kruger, many of us would never try anything.

There's a lot of value in the blessed innocence of not realizing how hard things are and how long it takes, because the other option is feeling overwhelmed and horrifically discouraged.
posted by maxsparber at 9:31 AM on August 10, 2021 [13 favorites]


I miss the days during which Cracked was good and Jason Pargin was regularly dispensing foul-mouthed pearls of wisdom.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 9:31 AM on August 10, 2021 [7 favorites]


The overall thesis here is kinda correct. In America, especially, there's a pervasive thing that combines temporarily-embarrassed-millionaire syndrome with the just-world fallacy. Everyone can make it, but only if they're a member of a deserving elect. Which is a contradiction, of course. For for 99% of people, they'll suffer from effort shock and the horror of failure. Especially if the "success" they're after is some culturally-determined wet-dream involving lambos and instagram models. And especially if the thing they want involves some kind of genetic suitability, like sports: it doesn't matter how hard you work, you just will. Not. Make it.

Back when I was working in a gas station, my coworker was studying civil engineering and would do hundreds and hundreds of small math problems in his notebook every night. This was bewildering to me because I thought of math as something you just got or didn't get. My parents didn't teach me to work at school (the never once helped with homework or anything else), they just said that I was smart, and since I was smart I would do well. Reader, I didn't. My coworker did, though. He graduated and left the gas station. It took me another five years to start my undergrad and I struggled all the way through to adapt to the amount of work that was required. It wasn't that I'm not smart enough. Intelligence is the grain. Work turns it into bread.

There was a phenomenon I used to see with a lot of the poor kids around me. They'd say, "I'm gonna be a famous rapper! You'll see!"

Me: are you performing?
Them: no.
Me: are you writing?
Them: no.
Me: are you putting out tapes?
Them: no.
Me: are you moving to Vancouver or LA?
Them: no.
Me: what are you gonna do?
Them: be a famous rapper!

So yeah, there's a big lacuna in some peoples' understanding of how much work it takes to even get into the position to be able to "fail."
posted by klanawa at 9:37 AM on August 10, 2021 [34 favorites]


There's a lot of value in the blessed innocence of not realizing how hard things are and how long it takes, because the other option is feeling overwhelmed and horrifically discouraged.

I hear you, and yet for me -- maybe because of how I grew up, which was a pretty fixed mindset environment -- it's actually really encouraging that it takes a lot of work.

For example, I just finished a painting class at a university level. My relationship to visual art is pretty long and complicated but can be summarized as "wasn't valued and was actively discouraged when I was a kid, especially through significant adults pointing out that my art was Bad." But in my early 30s, it occurred to me that art is something you can work at actively. I took a course, couldn't basically get through it, tried again, tried again...took videography and then design and finally...got to a point where I started feel like although I don't know things, I knew how to learn them?

Not sure how to explain it.

It took 15 years but in this course although my work is not like, amazing, I was able to find ways to bring something to life that was close to what I wanted to paint for each assignment. And sure, I'm not ever going to be An Artist but it's brought me so much joy and, I hope, lots more.
posted by warriorqueen at 9:52 AM on August 10, 2021 [23 favorites]


At the start of the pandemic, with a lot of free time on my hands, I became obsessed with training montages. The linked Rocky IV montage was one of my favorites. And I started walking, jogging, lifting the one weight I have here on the porch, adding a little weight each time it became too easy. And... being a scientist and professor in his early 50s, I was not particularly aiming to score a victory in the ring with a young Dolf Lundgren at the end. The training montage mentality fit pretty well for an amateur. It made my own drudgery, with no dramatic payoff at the end, seem epic. I went through the couch to 5K program. I'm aiming for my phone to tell me I take 12,000 steps a day on average, not to win the Cold War in a boxing match. I have a little spring in my step, my love handles are under control, but I'm not going to fit in with the Spartans of 300 with my fitness routines which never aimed to turn me to elite success.

The other way around that trap is not to aim at doing something very specific that everyone competes at so much better than everyone else, but to have your own niche, where the fact that you're doing something different from most gives you hope it could pay off. And then to aim for your own personal success, not the same markers as everyone else.

Noted as above though it's harder economically just to get by for systematic reasons.
posted by Schmucko at 9:53 AM on August 10, 2021 [5 favorites]


I miss the days during which Cracked was good and Jason Pargin was regularly dispensing foul-mouthed pearls of wisdom.

The author seems to be David Wong and Pargin is listed at top by mistake fwiw.
posted by Press Butt.on to Check at 9:53 AM on August 10, 2021


Jason Pargin writes (or did till last year) in yellowface.
posted by rikschell at 9:55 AM on August 10, 2021 [10 favorites]


Once upon a time, it was an open secret that Jason Pargin's pen name was David Wong, which I believed he liked to claim were the world's most common male first name and the most common surname.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 9:56 AM on August 10, 2021 [7 favorites]


Lucas skipped the whole training montage with a single line of dialogue.

Let us not forget Master Yoda's shit-show training advice: "Do or do not, there is no try."
posted by pwnguin at 10:02 AM on August 10, 2021 [8 favorites]


"If I work this hard, this many hours a week, I should have (a great job, a nice house, a nice car, etc). I don't have that thing, therefore something has corrupted the system and kept me from getting what I deserve..."

I mean, is this wrong? We should not accept a world where people working full time can still live in poverty. Hell, no one should be living in poverty. I notice that this was written in 2010; I think we've moved onto a better understanding of systems beyond personal responsibility since then.


Yes, but that belief (whether true or not) is also at the core of almost every act of white male entitlement, including the 1/6 riot.
posted by Thorzdad at 10:04 AM on August 10, 2021


Ah, thank you, rikschell and DirtyOldTown. I read the self-help book joke and thought it was odd (yes along "yellowface" lines). I kinda wish it was just the technical glitch I thought it was. (Neither the author nor the pseudonym were previously familiar to me.)
posted by Press Butt.on to Check at 10:22 AM on August 10, 2021 [2 favorites]


I always liked that about Star Wars, GI Joe cartoons, and 'The Rock' movies - like everyone can just fly a fighter jet or helicopter in addition to their other skills.

Everyone in the Fast and the Furious family can drive like an illegal street racer, even if their designated speciality is mechanic or thief or spy.
posted by Apocryphon at 10:28 AM on August 10, 2021 [2 favorites]


I don't have much use for people who cite Malcolm Gladwell as an "expert." The so-called 10,000-hour rule has been debunked numerous times. I do think that being exceptionally successful usually involves some combination of hard work and good luck, but those are the outliers anyway.
posted by Halloween Jack at 10:35 AM on August 10, 2021 [9 favorites]


There's a lot of value in the blessed innocence of not realizing how hard things are and how long it takes

Listen, beginner's mind is important! It's not a magical path to accomplishment, but it is super important in creativity. "We didn't know how hard it was, so we tried it, and we came up with some goofy new ideas that eventually we refined into something really good and new" is a narrative you'll hear from a lot of older artists looking back on their career.
posted by praemunire at 10:50 AM on August 10, 2021 [14 favorites]


I am here to tell you that we have relay walked* almost all the way across the Pacific Ocean.
posted by aniola at 10:56 AM on August 10, 2021 [1 favorite]


This article does make some sense to me, at least in some situations. It's that effort and results are not and have never been directly connected, especially in environments where other people are involved and there's a political aspect.

For example, if I was told to make a web page, and I spent months learning various programming languages, how to create images with Illustrator, etc. I'm still going to end up with something that's inferior to one that was created in Squarespace in a week.

Along the same lines, if I work really hard at my job and put in a lot of overtime, I'm not going to get promoted to a manager because being a manager is a completely different job and requires a different set of skills, none of which are "working hard with a lot of overtime". Also I have saved the company a ton of money by not hiring the correct number of employees (because overtime is actually a failure of staffing), so they want to keep me in this position for as long as possible.
posted by meowzilla at 11:00 AM on August 10, 2021


Did anyone else watch Head of the Class back in the 80s? It was about a class of gifted students in a New York high school. One of the students was a 10 year old named Janice, who was the smartest of the smart. She was also weird in a way that my early elementary school self really identified with.

One episode the kids had found a note written in another language and were trying to translate it to solve a mystery. They had one day to figure it out, but if the note was in Greek Janice would need a whole weekend to learn enough to translate what they had. Young me was like "One weekend. Sounds reasonable." And I was too young to not know that it's not possible in any meaningful way.

And what's hilarious is that I grew up and became a computational linguist and had to learn to read well enough in 6 languages so I could check my work, with just a few months to learn each on my own. But I wasn't a fictional character, so I felt kind of stupid because I'd internalized something so deeply that I never thought about questioning it.

At least I stuck with it, unlike piano. How many other people gave up after not immediately being good at it?
posted by Alison at 11:04 AM on August 10, 2021 [15 favorites]


I've always wanted to learn to make music, but I spent my youth VERY committed to being an illustrator, and felt I just didn't have the space in my life to cultivate two creative disciplines.

Interrogating that as a more mature potato, I certainly had space in my life for painting plus a couple hours of World of Warcraft or Godzilla movies or whatever, so I think the truth is; I hate making bad music, but I can make really bad drawings all damn day and not feel like it was wasted time. So I did that and over time the drawings I feel aren't very good are still things a lot of folks would consider a success. I got pretty good at it.

There was hard work to be sure, but I don't think hard work what's missing from triumphalist fiction. I think it's the value of having a relationship with what you're doing. Karate Kid is, ironically, not really about Karate, as Rocky is not really about boxing. The skills they're building are just context for a morality play about conflict and growth. The subtlety of caring and cultivating, that's just harder to depict, and not particularly exciting in comparison. I'd be interested to see a movie do it well but none come to mind. Patterson with poetry, maybe?
posted by Phobos the Space Potato at 11:04 AM on August 10, 2021 [2 favorites]


One of the most important lessons I ever learned as a freelance contractor:

You dont have to be an expert, you just have to be better at it than the person who hired you.

And the most important lesson I learned about moving ahead in a career:

If you can learn it reasonably well in under 6 months, it's not lying to put it on your resume and tell your interviewer you can do it.

I extrapolated that from a quote by some CEO type dude who said 'if I only applied for jobs I was qualified for, I'd still be sweeping floors'
posted by ananci at 11:09 AM on August 10, 2021 [15 favorites]


Janice! Hero to all small girls who'd been skipped ahead. (They're doing a reboot???)
posted by praemunire at 11:17 AM on August 10, 2021 [2 favorites]


A couple weeks of dedicated practice won’t make you an expert at most things but it will likely make you notably more competent than the next guy. Which for most things is good enough.

Amen. In an earlier iteration of my career, I worked as a technical consultant, generally leading small teams of developers. To try and compete with the offshore body shops, we did a lot of hiring direct from college, followed by a brief period of classroom training, and then it was into the deep end on a client site. It took a fair bit of coaching to get some people through the "imposter syndrome" stage of Working a Real Job.

I had a little monologue / pep talk that I would give new hires, generally in the rental car on the way to the client site for the first time. It basically amounted to: "if we didn't think you could do this, we wouldn't have hired you," and "as far as the client is concerned, you're an expert, because you know more about this stuff than they do. If you don't know something, tell them you'll figure it out, and we'll figure it out. Probably with Google."

A fairly common reaction was a kind of abject horror: like "wait, is this... is this what everyone does? This is how the world works?!"

That is how the world works.

That said, the Dunning-Kreuger trap is real. You need to have enough confidence in yourself being able to do the thing, if you want to do the thing, but you can't have so much confidence that you overestimate your own abilities. Sometimes threading that needle can be tricky.
posted by Kadin2048 at 11:34 AM on August 10, 2021 [14 favorites]




Sometimes I suspect that hardly anything would get accomplished, ever, if it weren't for the combination of wild over-optimism about how quickly it will get done, combined with our firm attachment to the sunk-cost fallacy.
posted by clawsoon at 11:52 AM on August 10, 2021 [2 favorites]


As a dear friend of mine once said, “I never would have tried becoming a professional musician if I’d had any idea how hard it is…I really feel like most human accomplishment is driven by some combination of naïveté and false hope.”
posted by LooseFilter at 11:55 AM on August 10, 2021 [9 favorites]


I read this article a year or two after it came out and for what it's worth, I found it really encouraging. It meant that all of those things I felt bad about about not being good at were actually not just a matter of effort and gumption; that I wouldn't be able to (e.g.) run a marathon if I just put my mind to it for a few months.

It meant that I could be content with just being better than before at the things I cared about and writing off the other stuff.
posted by suetanvil at 12:14 PM on August 10, 2021 [1 favorite]


need a whole weekend to learn enough to translate what they had. Young me was like "One weekend. Sounds reasonable." And I was too young to not know that it's not possible in any meaningful way.

(Maybe not for most people, but I recently read a little free library book "Born on a Blue Day" and the author of that book was quite capable of learning a language in a week, and could have learned enough Greek to translate a note in a weekend.)
posted by aniola at 12:22 PM on August 10, 2021 [1 favorite]


Everyone in the Fast and the Furious family can drive like an illegal street racer, even if their designated speciality is mechanic or thief or spy.

To be fair they

killed the guy who was a better mechanic than driver
.
posted by Mitheral at 12:41 PM on August 10, 2021


My wife taught me how to whistle and snap my fingers when I was in my late 20s. It took a couple of days at least but at the end of it I could make the right sounds even if making sounds is about all my whistling still amounts to. Ever since then I figured that I'd be able to do any other kind of normal-type thing as long as I put in the effort. Maybe I wouldn't do it particularly well but enough to say that I could do it. I think its a good mindset to have, that I actually could do anything if I put the work into it, not that it would make me rich or famous or happy or anything like that, but that if I wanted to do something I could so I shouldn't let the fact that I can't do something now stop me from trying something new. And yet, and yet, I still cannot blow bubbles with bubble gum and when I try and fail my 7 year-old kid will just casually blow a big bubble in my face. I just need to practice a bit more, that's all.
posted by any portmanteau in a storm at 12:57 PM on August 10, 2021 [1 favorite]


Isn't this sort if like watching a 'How to' YouTube video then doing it? I have taken apart and put back together my truck's steering wheel and steering column while watching and pausing a YT video. I now consider myself proficient. It was done out of necessity. No money or time to take it to the shop. What is the saying? Necessity is the mother of invention? If you believe hard enough, it can be done. Just takes 4 times as long as they say on the video.
posted by AugustWest at 1:14 PM on August 10, 2021 [4 favorites]


I just need to practice a bit more, that's all.

You can do it! I know someone who learned to whistle in her late 40s or early 50s. She wandered around the house not-whistling for a couple months? years? first, but she got it figured out!
posted by aniola at 1:27 PM on August 10, 2021


You can do it! I know someone who learned to whistle in her late 40s or early 50s.

I tried to explain to someone online how to whistle.

They thought I was talking dirty to them.
posted by clawsoon at 1:37 PM on August 10, 2021 [2 favorites]


My first girlfriend was a very gifted athlete who held the mile record, the high jump record and some other middle distance record at her large high school even though she skipped her senior year (it wasn't till we'd been living together for a year that she let slip she'd also been the silver medalist in the shot put at the state Junior Olympics when she was a junior, an event she'd never competed in or trained for, and entered only so that her high school team would have enough events to be considered for team medals).

She just seemed to learn any physical skill almost effortlessly -- she became a star in the local mountaineering community in less than a season, for example.

She decided to take up Karate when she turned 20, the third year we lived together, was doing very well at the locally prestigious studio where she enrolled, and toward the end of her first month, they had their annual regional tournament.

The studio founder encouraged her to enter the combat competition 'just for the experience' even though she was only a white belt -- and she won! Beating black belts in the semifinals and finals. But then there was a huge uproar, because the woman she beat in the finals claimed blood in her mouth from a strike, and after an extended argument she was disqualified. The studio head was pretty bitter about that because his school hadn't won the women's combat competition before, but it didn't seem to bother my girlfriend.

So there are people like that, and success for them seems to be more a matter of what they choose to do than the effort they put in.
posted by jamjam at 1:42 PM on August 10, 2021 [2 favorites]


I just need to practice a bit more, that's all.

I don't quote this to contradict you, any portmanteau in a storm, but just to introduce my corollary to the article's (weakly-made) point about effort, which is another movie fallacy that irks me: the idea that all you need is time and effort to master something. Think of Groundhog Day, and how all Bill Murray needs is scads of time to become truly adept at ice sculpture and piano.

Time and practice definitely do their share, but there has to be some kind of existing aptitude or physical capability. I have figured out over the years, for instance, that I don't have the capacity to do fine work with my hands—like cutting-in when painting a wall without masking the ceiling*, or drawing a really straight line freehand. I have friends and acquaintances who can do these kinds of things all day long. Not me.

I learned a lot, too, by having a kid who is athletically gifted. It was obvious before he could even walk that he had something going on that neither of his older siblings had. He was a competitive gymnast until he was 11 or 12, and now he is a 14-year-old diver whose coach thinks he's likely to be recruited by a college. You could give me, my partner, and our other three kids ten zillion years to practice and we'd never achieve what he has already managed. He told me recently that he can learn to do a skill by watching someone else do it—that his body just learns it that way. He won't be perfect at it, but he'll have the gist of it and be able to take that into his very first attempts. I don't know that any amount of practice is going to let another person catch up on the head start certain kinds of gifts can confer, at least as a general rule. I leave the door open for exceptions.

*Twenty years ago, when we moved into this house, I painted the room that is my bedroom. As my disability has progressed, I'm spending more and more time in here, and I've started wanting to paint it—I've never been happy with the wall color.

When it came time to paint this room, we were under a very tight deadline to get out of the house we were selling, so my work was a little more sloppy than usual, even. Along one wall, there are some paint blots on the ceiling that look like 1) a person in a speedboat; 2) a fireball; 3) another blob further along that isn't anything in particular itself but represents whatever the person in the speedboat is firing the fireball at.

Recently, when my 14yo and 17yo heard me talking about painting the room, they made me promise not to paint over this little montage. They've been amused by it since they were little kids crawling into bed to sleep with my partner and me, and they're very attached to it. I love that a mistake that represents one of my limitations has become a fond childhood memory for them.
posted by Orlop at 1:45 PM on August 10, 2021 [23 favorites]


Thinking more about montage sequences and why I like them: I don't think it's that it suggests training is quick and easy, it suggests that you can get into a state of FLOW. Montage sequences are great at giving that feeling. Not that it takes little time but the time SEEMS to go by before you know it. Each day or training session blurs into the next. There will be variety, small victories and small setbacks along the way, but you'll be carried along by momentum of the overall story. Rocky's not going to sit it out for a few weeks to fight Noobmaster on some online gaming platform because he's in the middle of a montage sequence. And so it helps psych me up too, hey, I'm in the middle of my own montage sequence, that's just the rhythm of it, of course I'll get some exercise today.

My least favorite montage sequence is in Dark Knight Rises when (spoiler) after having his back broken by Bane, Bruce/Batman gets a little spine adjustment, does a few pullups, climbs out of a hole in some hokey combination of "use the Force, Luke!" and "there is no try, do!", and emerges better than ever. That one was too easy.
posted by Schmucko at 2:21 PM on August 10, 2021 [1 favorite]


I grew up making websites with HTML and CSS, but didn't learn how to program until I was 19? 20? because it seemed like the kind of thing that people started doing when they were little kids, driven by passion - I thought it was going to be really hard and I'd missed the boat.

Then I took a beginner class at university and it turned out that programming was extremely easy. I switched majors to Computer Science and it was still pretty easy - I definitely was not putting in 100% effort to get As and Bs.

Now I do it for a living. I wouldn't say I'm a super expert (some of my coworkers amaze me), but I'm good enough to get paid. So, in conclusion, I nearly catastrophically overestimated the level of effort required for doing a CS major.

Dance is really hard though. Fuck dance.

(To tie this to a larger issue, I actually think overvalorizing difficulty can deter underrepresented minorities from joining the field because they're less likely to have been grinding at it since childhood. Olympic-level gymnastics, maybe, but the majority of fields are not that dire.)
posted by airmail at 2:34 PM on August 10, 2021 [1 favorite]


and could have learned enough Greek to translate a note in a weekend

Ancient Greek? Nah. Modern Icelandic is just another Germanic language, e.g., fairly closely related to his first language (and to another language he knows). It even has a fixed word order!
posted by praemunire at 2:53 PM on August 10, 2021


This isn't a great song, but I've always appreciated that it describes a 10 step process to become an Overnight Success in music and step 1 takes up 1:20 of a 4 total minutes, and step 2 another minute, comprising about 10 years of a lifetime in the song.
posted by The_Vegetables at 3:07 PM on August 10, 2021


This is a meritocracy problem. In developed societies (and not just ones in the West!) the distribution of political and social power has to be justified in some way, and ‘hard work’ replaced older categories early in the 20thC, like ‘being a gentleman/lady’, or ‘being well brought up’. Aristocracy was another justified hierarchy, so you see in older literature instead of a training montage, the protagonist is revealed—she marries a Duke! Or, he was actually the Prince of Ruthenia all along! Even the Count of Monte Cristo, the proto-montage trainer, really only amassed a gigantic pile of money. Heroic acts are even older, thinking of Davids showing themselves not through work but through some kind of honourable, revelatory but of violent Goliath-killing. To see David doing the push-ups and sit-ups he would have needed to do to sling his pebble misses the point of the story.

Some societies half-see through the lie of meritocracy, but can’t not pay tribute to that ritual of ‘hard work’, so even in the UK where the Prime Minister and all his mates went to one of half a dozen boarding schools, and one of two universities, they still insist, even to themselves, that their rationale for leadership is the effort they put in. And it’s true—every one of them has certainly had to work hard. But. But.
posted by Fiasco da Gama at 3:28 PM on August 10, 2021 [10 favorites]


On the power of hard practice: My Dad is famously uncoordinated. He (and me too) ranks a 3 on a scale of 1 to 10. He threw a baseball once at a family gathering, and its unexpected trajectory frightened everyone. However in his younger days in the 1960s, he owned and worked in a laundry where he ironed and folded shirts six days a week. He did this for ten years. If you saw him iron a shirt you'd be stunned at how freaky fast he does it. When he folds a shirt it's done in seconds, and the result is so tidy and straight it looks like a machine did it.
posted by storybored at 3:36 PM on August 10, 2021 [7 favorites]


We hired a technician during the pandemic, but then because she couldn't come in and do lab work, we had to find stuff for her to do. We decided she could translate all the Latin diagnoses for the species we were studying. We thought this was *possible*, since I once had a course in Botanical Latin 30 years ago and could help her if she got stuck. So we set her loose with Google Translate and some websites. And guess what? She did just fine with no help. So sometimes the trick is not to tell them that what you are asking is ridiculous.
posted by acrasis at 3:54 PM on August 10, 2021 [1 favorite]


I would add, speaking of myths people tell themselves, the people here saying programming is actually easier than it’s made out to be by programmers is very instructive about this. At our present moment, because firms depending on them have such a strong capital backing, programmers of networks enjoy a huge social and technical cachet. It’s not a coincidence that the ‘learn to code’ lads make it out to be a difficult field, dependent purely and only on ‘hard work’ and ‘learning the hard way’, and indeed try to make their tools as opaque (‘just read the man page’, ‘not documented’) as possible.

It’s meritocratic power exerting itself even over the stories people tell about themselves.
posted by Fiasco da Gama at 4:05 PM on August 10, 2021 [4 favorites]


Then there's the fun thing where, if I can do a thing, I feel the ability to do so must be universal, since, well, I can do it. This led me to being an outrageous jerk for a long time until I realized that no, not everyone can do things I can do, and I need to stop being frustrated with people over it.

And the flipside, of course, was seeing people able to do things I couldn't, and convincing myself that I was an idiot because I couldn't figure out how to do what they could.

It took me, honestly, most of my life to realize there are things I do that I frankly deserve to have some pride in, and that there are some things that I cannot do, and that my inability to do them is not an indicator of my worthlessness.
posted by Ghidorah at 4:07 PM on August 10, 2021 [10 favorites]


if I can do a thing, I feel the ability to do so must be universal

I have had a really unpleasant manifestation of this as I have been forced, through "career progression" to practice my trade less and manage other workers more. It is this: whenever there is a task that I am good at and enjoy doing, my subconscious tells me that it is an "easy" task which I should assign to a subordinate, while I go find a "hard" task to do instead. This means that a lot of my subordinates get unfair expectations from me about how hard a task should be for them, and also that I don't get to enjoy my work!
posted by agentofselection at 4:19 PM on August 10, 2021 [7 favorites]


Ancient Greek? Nah.

I heard ancient Greek is easier to learn than modern Greek because it follows its own grammatical rules a lot more strictly.
posted by aniola at 5:05 PM on August 10, 2021


The article makes the mistake of blaming fantasy for how consumers of fantasy encounter real life. We fantasize (and go to movies like Karate Kid) because real life is disappointing.

If you know anything at all about any subject presented in movies (how much professors are paid, what is involved in fencing, what classroom teaching is like) it is very hard not to notice how remarkably wrong they get that subject. But they do that on purpose, because it is more appealing that way.
posted by Peach at 6:09 PM on August 10, 2021 [3 favorites]


But also reality isn't realistic [TV Tropes].
posted by Mitheral at 7:31 PM on August 10, 2021 [1 favorite]


I believe that the joke behind the David Wong pen name was intended to be that ha ha, I picked a common surname to hide behind and you racist fucks might be confounded that "common" surnames are Asian even though I am transparently white.

It turned out that the main takeaway seemed to be that implying you might be Asian when you aren't is a shit move when Pargin and his associates/fanboys are not and understand how that affects things.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 8:50 PM on August 10, 2021


To further elaborate on a point made earlier : Daniel spends the bulk of all three of those movies getting beat up. He never seems to be very good at karate compared to his opponents, probably because the movies go to great lengths to establish that being adept at using karate to kick someone's ass is really not the point!
posted by Dokterrock at 11:35 PM on August 10, 2021 [1 favorite]


The reason the world works this way is because society relies on jobs that companies pay so poorly that almost if not literally the only people who do them are people who have given up.

Capitalism has to end, or the human race will. One or the other.
posted by BiggerJ at 2:52 AM on August 11, 2021 [1 favorite]


This is why, to be good at something, you have to enjoy the process and care zero about the final result. Because there is no final result. Just progress. So enjoy the ride!

So much easier if your parents are paying your rent and/or grocery bill, and maybe even paying for you to travel so you don't end up so provincial that all the other successful folks you like find you off-putting.
posted by amtho at 7:50 AM on August 11, 2021 [2 favorites]


If you can learn it reasonably well in under 6 months, it's not lying to put it on your resume and tell your interviewer you can do it.

I wish I had seen this thread last week. I just failed to get a position doing something I know I could do in my sleep, apparently because I have no experience doing this particular task all my skills scream I would excel at, and I was too honest about said lack of experience. (I think. Maybe one of the interviewers didn't my shirt. Who can tell.)
posted by Devoidoid at 8:32 AM on August 11, 2021


Sorry, going meta here. How is it that Cracked.com even exists? When I was a teen Cracked was Mad magazine's poor cousin, and I would buy a copy every summer while waiting for a new issue of Nat Lamp or Heavy Metal or some decent comics to finally show up at the local drug store. And every summer I would rediscover how lame Cracked magazine was.

It's the web. There are still an infinite number of names available for an online humor site. How did anyone ever think this was a good brand?
posted by morspin at 10:23 AM on August 11, 2021


The T-16 is closer to an X-wing than it is to Luke's air car. Wings, blasters, etc. There's plenty of handwavium floating around in the story but I'm okay with saying flying that thing is reasonable training for flying the deluxe version of the same.
posted by The Monster at the End of this Thread at 10:46 AM on August 11, 2021


"I understand you've become quite a good pilot yourself. "

Obi-Wan set it up for you right at the start.
posted by Devoidoid at 11:03 AM on August 11, 2021


I can't take this article even remotely seriously, or even make myself read past the first couple of sentences:
I think The Karate Kid ruined the modern world.

Not just that movie, but all of the movies like it (you certainly can't let the Rocky sequels escape blame). Basically any movie with a training montage.

You know what I'm talking about; the main character is very bad at something, then there is a sequence in the middle of the film set to upbeat music that shows him practicing. When it's done, he's an expert.
Has this dude even seen The Karate Kid? The first movie is just over two hours long and well over half of it is Daniel either getting his ass absolutely handed to him, doing menial labor at Mr. Miyagi's house, or training. He spends the whole trilogy getting his ass handed to him and then getting lucky when the one trick move he spent the whole movie learning actually works long enough to knock a bully down.

Like, sure, be mad at montage movies all you want for somehow misleading you about how hard things are hard or whatever but... maybe actually pick one of those movies to be the central target of your argument?

yes, I am a Karate Kid superfan and a pedant and now I'm PISSED OFF ABOUT INACCURACIES and READY TO ARGUE
posted by palomar at 2:40 PM on August 11, 2021 [6 favorites]


Frowner: This is a problem the author has in at least one other article: he shows how shitty the world is but doesn't dare even imagine that things could be improved. It's as if his depression is seeking other people to infect, like a cancer spreading from cell to cell.
posted by BiggerJ at 10:44 PM on August 11, 2021


Side note on the "I miss when Cracked was good" front, highly recommend the Robert Evans (the guy who ran Cracked's Personal Experiences section, which hid knife sharp serious journalism in comedy) podcast Behind The Bastards.
posted by MattWPBS at 10:14 AM on August 13, 2021


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