[lsc]

My own personal view is that some attributes are mostly fixed, and some are not, and it's pretty hard to tell which is which.

Sometimes you need to struggle for a long time through stuff you aren't any good at to get to something you are good at. I love reading and read very quickly, with above average, but less impressive compared to speed, comprehension.

But it took me longer than usual to learn to read. I assume because I'm terrible at memorization; and to learn to read, you need to memorize enough words that you can start puzzling out the words you don't know from context. I would not have done well if I had given up on reading because I was inherently bad at one of the prerequisites.

On the other hand, I spent a lot of time trying to run a business... and that turned out to be something I didn't get good at after a decade of trying; so yeah, sometimes it's best to give up early, but it can be really hard to predict which side of that equation a particular problem is on.

[lsc]

A better comparison to reading is writing. My handwriting is terrible. Like not doctor-terrible; there's at least dignity in that. It's a grade-schooler's block letters. It's terrible. And I spent so much wasted time and effort on it.

I mean, I've had access to a computer since the mid-80s, so I could write, I just couldn't hand write. And it turns out? nobody cares about my handwriting anymore. It's not that useful when you have portable computers. (In the mid '90s I took a tandy TRS-80 model 100 to high school. Such a nice keyboard)

I argued and fought with my parents who made me practice handwriting, arguing even in the early '90s that it was an obsolete skill; but they sat with me for hours a day, making me copy letters. Just like they did earlier, when they were making me learn how to read.

But reading, well, it went from a struggle to make me practice to the thing I got in trouble for doing when I was supposed to be doing other things almost overnight. It was like I finally memorized enough of the words to figure out young adult fiction, and a whole new world opened up to me.

Handwriting never got to that point, even though there was a lot more struggle involved. To this day, I can't write coherently with a pencil and paper for more than a sentence or two; it takes too much focus to make the letters, and the thoughts about the sentence or paragraph evaporate.

How much of this is my own motivation? I do remember arguing that handwriting was useless 'cause I could type, and that was better. If I had access to a state of the art screen reader (they existed at the time, and I think were okay?) I maybe would have made the same arguments about reading. Would that have made it harder for me to actually learn to read?