2025-11-06
It has been a long time since I last felt the urge to win.
It may be my personality, but creating something suits my nature better than fighting within the rules.
If I ever did think 〈I want to win〉, in a sense I will come back to, I would look for a way to 〈win〉 through talent rather than effort.
What is needed is an 〈effort〉, effort in another sense, to make effort unnecessary. It is an 〈effort〉 aimed at making things easy, not an effort aimed at obtaining results directly.
Let us call the illusory collective that worships effort the Church of Effort.
Its doctrine, however, is not the simple "if you work hard, you will be rewarded." Its structure is murkier, clingier, and thoroughly human.
The more someone has achieved results, the more they say "just work harder" or "effort can solve it." Those who take these words literally, at face value, come to think, "I'm working hard, so something will surely come of it," or "I'm not working hard enough, so I'm no good."
The Church of Effort rests on this faint hope and strong self-blame. It is not the achievers who proselytize, but the very illusion of those who want to believe in effort.
If you are not rewarded, it is your fault. If you cannot keep going, your heart is weak. In this way the faith deepens, and an idol called "the self that is making an effort" comes to be worshipped.
Beside them are those who do not seem to be making any effort, yet keep being rewarded. They get results easily, or rather, results 〈just come〉 to them easily, and their existence is too dazzling for the faithful of the Church of Effort.
Before long, that dazzle turns into envy, and the faithful come to believe that "those who take it easy and don't try hard are cheating," that "taking it easy is wrong."
The Church of Effort can save no one.
It only stirs people up: "You must beat someone through effort." Yet no one knows whom to beat, or how.
The faithful of the Church of Effort repeat the same thoughts over and over.
They hope, "I'm working hard, so I should surely be rewarded," and blame themselves, "I'm not rewarded because I'm not trying hard enough." That cycle is the mechanism that sustains the faith.
Eventually, for them, effort becomes not a means of getting results but a ritual they need in order to hold themselves together.
By placing the unrewarded present as something "noble," the faith regenerates itself.
And so the Church of Effort falls into a darkness without end.
What the faithful truly want is not a future in which they are rewarded, but a safe future in which they can go on protecting "the self that is not rewarded."
If you are reading this from the angle of "which matters more, effort or talent," you are misreading it.
That way of reading is itself proof that talent has already been overlooked.
Effort and talent are not opposed.
It is true that effort is a structure that keeps consuming time as quantity, and that talent has a structure that converts that time into quality. Quantity does not pile up; quality changes.
The place where that conversion happens is precisely the boundary where effort and talent melt into each other.
There, 〈effort〉 stops being effort and turns into a mere natural 〈movement〉.
The "trying hard" and "I have to try hard" that lived in consciousness disappear, and the act itself turns into talent.
This may be misunderstood, but it is not a rejection of effort.
It is simply that even fighting within the rules is made possible by talent.
There, the gaps and openings that effort could fill do not exist to begin with.
If someone talks about "effort," it is an 〈effort〉 of the kind that leads on to talent. They mean no harm. It is just confusing.
And yet, seeing someone who has misunderstood, they would surely wonder why their message isn't getting across: "That's not the form I meant, and I can't understand why you're doing that."
That is how hard to understand the act looks from the outside.
Standing on the battlefield with effort alone is like fighting stark naked, without any equipment. The outcome is decided before you even step into the ring.
The moment you think "I want to win," your defeat is already settled. Talent has already 〈won〉 before it ever thinks of wanting to win.
Then when does that 〈victory〉 begin?
Loving something has a special meaning.
The feeling of "liking" is the very foundation of a test environment that supports trial and error. People who love something try many things. That is why "I love it, but I have no talent for it" is impossible.
It's not that you have no talent; you just haven't noticed it yet. Or, as is often the case, it turns out you only think you love it. In short, a misunderstanding.
The latter case is a bit tricky, but it shows in how a person reacts when told, "You have talent." They dislike being told so, or push back: "You know nothing about the effort I've put in."
That is less anger than something close to a defensive reaction to not being understood.
On the other hand, some people feel nothing in particular when told "You have talent." It simply ends with "Is that so."
The difference is whether loving something has become a means of proving oneself, or whether it is rooted as pure interest in itself.
Encountering it may involve the 〈effort〉 of trial and error. But would they themselves call that effort? They would probably answer, "I'm just doing it because I like it."
That is why the very idea of "going out to find your talent" is a strange one. Because that is not 〈effort〉 but plain effort.
Finding yourself is the same. What you find on a journey of "going out to find myself" is, in most cases, not the 〈self〉 you wanted to find but the self you didn't want to see.
By loving something, people discover countless bugs within themselves. Rather than treating those bugs as defects and turning back, see that your distinctive traits live in them.
That is why loving something is the necessary condition for noticing your talent. And from there, 〈victory〉 begins on its own.
To put it in more general terms, it resembles the "skill" system in an RPG.
The skill points granted at each level-up are equal for everyone. Put them into attack, or magic, or spend them on defense or healing. Agonizing over how to allocate limited points, you gradually build your own shape. Little by little you acquire skills and grow stronger.
Talent almost never blossoms from the start. At first everyone is about the same; at most, a little better. Naturally. You hardly have any points yet, and you haven't even "allocated" them.
Then, as you keep going, there comes a moment when you suddenly notice: the skill points you should have been spending somehow aren't going down.
"That's weird, they just never go down..."
That sense that something is off is the bug, the turning point.
The more time you put in, the more the quality leaps, and the finite turns into the infinite. This phenomenon is the crossing from the domain of effort into the domain of talent.
It is not an extension of effort, but a phenomenon that arises spontaneously in an entirely different dimension.
People often say, "Persistence is a talent."
But as long as there is the will to "keep going," it is still in the domain of effort.
Talent is in a state where you forget even that you are continuing.
The person has no awareness of making an effort. Yet to others, it looks like tremendous effort.
It is not that thinking "I'll keep going" keeps it going, but that "it keeps going of its own accord" keeps it going.
No one's will enters into it. This subtle gap is the decisive difference that separates effort from talent.
To make it easier to understand, let me categorize.
"Winning" has two meanings. One is winning in order to defeat others. The other is a transcendent 〈win〉 that goes beyond the very structure of competition.
The former belongs to the world of effort, the latter to the world of talent. Self-mastery, winning over oneself, is closer to the latter. The self that wins and the self that loses exist at the same time.
Effort shaves off finite time to earn quantity. Talent changes the quality of time and produces results spontaneously.
You may be starting to see the meaning of the "want to win" at the beginning.
The first "I want to win" belongs to the domain of effort; the second 〈I want to win〉 goes beyond competition itself.
Effort is the act of consuming time quantitatively. Talent is the act of converting time qualitatively.
The difference creates a small distortion in space-time, and infinite time flows into it. In that moment, a person goes beyond the structure of effort and returns to the natural 〈movement〉.
So to 〈win〉 through talent does not mean winning the contest. It means going beyond the very structure of the contest.
Naturally, somehow, you end up winning.
Naturally, you end up doing something like effort.
That is what I call sai (才), the "gift" at the root of sainō, talent, without the nō, ability.
Go beyond the desire to win, and simply, naturally, be sai.