Tags: discipline volumen
From Haruki Murakami’s novel Kafka on the Shore, (Murakami, 2006) translated into English by Philip Gabriel. The passage appears in a section where the character Oshima is speaking to Kafka Tamura about talent, discipline, and what Murakami calls “the plateau of talent.”
They can’t take it any further. And why not? Because they won’t put in the effort. Because they haven’t had the discipline pounded into them. They’ve been spoiled. They have just enough talent so they’ve been able to play things well without any effort and they’ve had people telling them how great they are from the time they’re little, so hard work looks stupid to them. They’ll take some piece another kid has to work on for three weeks and polish it off in half the time, so the teacher figures they’ve put enough into it and lets them go to the next thing. And they do that in half the time and go on to the next piece. They never find out what it means to be hammered by the teacher; they lose out on a certain element required for character building. It’s a tragedy.