Category: Notes

When we see someone doing something well, speaking clearly, writing with ease, making sense of complicated ideas, we often make an assumption: they must just be naturally good at this.

It’s a strange leap when you stop and think about it. We see the outcome and invent the origin story. Competence becomes talent, fluency transforms into instinct. And in that version of the story, the work disappears.

I’m not an anthropologist, so I’m not going to try to unpack the cultural reasons behind this. But I do think it’s worth pausing on the assumption itself.

How do we know?

How do we know this is something a person was simply born good at, rather than something they struggled through, practiced, failed at, and slowly got better at over time?

Because those two paths look identical once you reach a certain point. Polished delivery doesn’t carry a label explaining how many awkward drafts came before it. Clear thinking doesn’t show the hours were spent confused and lost. Ease, from the outside, hides the friction that may have produced it.

Even when someone does have some raw talent or natural affinity for something, that still isn’t the whole story. There’s a meaningful difference between raw talent and developed skill. Between a flash of ability and something that has been shaped, refined, and made reliable through practice.

Raw instinct, on its own, is fragile. It shows up inconsistently. It doesn’t hold under pressure. It doesn’t compound. Talent only becomes impressive when it’s worked on long enough to mature.

The idea that someone could simply arrive fully formed, out-compose experienced musicians, or consistently outplay expert chess players without years of effort is far rarer than we tend to believe. Those people exist (maybe), but they are the exception, not the model. Most of us, even those with genuine aptitude, still have to put in the time. We have to practice. We have to refine. We have to stick with it long after the initial spark fades.

I think it’s perfectly fine to tell someone they’re good at something. We should probably do that more, not less.

What’s strange is how often we stop there and decide in our minds that this must have come easily to them. That it’s instinct, or talent, or some natural advantage we don’t have access to.

In many cases, the truth is much less romantic and much more impressive. Someone cared enough to work at it. To be bad for a while. To stay with the discomfort long enough that what once felt effortful now reads as ease.

When we assume skill is natural, we erase that effort. And we also let ourselves off the hook, as if improvement were reserved for a different kind of person.

Being good at something doesn’t mean you were inherently born with that skill at that level. Often, it just means you stayed with it longer than most people do.

I’ve participated in the Goodreads Reading Challenge every year since 2014.

That’s a tidy, fancy phrase for something much simpler. Every year, I decide how many books I hope to read, and I try to meet myself there.

Before that, during school and university, reading wasn’t a goal so much as a constant. I don’t have a record of how many books I read, but between assigned texts and the books I sought out on my own, I was probably reading forty to fifty books a year without much effort. Reading was woven into my days, not something I had to justify or schedule.

After school, I started my own business, and my attention shifted. Work demanded more of me, and slowly, almost imperceptibly, reading began to slip to the margins. Looking back now, the pattern feels obvious. The number of books I read in any given year became a quiet barometer of my inner life. Years filled with books meant my work was sustainable. Years with very few books meant work was crowding out most other things.

For a long time, I was also careless about keeping track. If a book wasn’t on my Kindle, it often didn’t make it to my Goodreads record. Over the years, I’ve become more intentional about that.

Last year, I made sure every book I read was documented, not that I read much. Learning how to be a parent has a way of rearranging everything.

This year feels like a turning point. For the first time in more than a decade, I’ve set a reading goal higher than the familiar twenty to thirty books. This year, the goal is fifty two.

It’s part of a larger intention I’ve set for myself, to live well, with the word persist as my word of the year. Not in the sense of grinding through, but in the sense of returning, again and again, to the things that make life feel spacious and alive.

I also have a backlog. Over the years, I’ve gathered a pile of unread books, both digital and physical. Books I bought with excitement. Books I imagined future versions of myself settling into. So part of this year’s practice is turning toward what I already have, trusting that abundance doesn’t always require acquisition, even if I know I won’t resist every new title that catches my eye.

For me, reading exists in a middle place. It is both a luxury and a necessity.

It’s a luxury because my life feels full, and reading now requires intention. It asks for time that must be claimed, protected, and revisited regularly. It doesn’t sneak into the cracks of my days the way it once did.

It’s a necessity because reading is directly tied to how joyful, steady, and generative I feel. It gives texture to my thinking and depth to my days. Music comes close, but its effects are fleeting. Books linger. They settle into you. They reshape how you notice things, how you name experiences, how you understand yourself and others.

Words take up residence in the small, unlit corners of the mind, illuminating places you didn’t realize were waiting for light.

Reading fills me in a way nothing else quite does.

So this year, I want to fill my cup deliberately and generously. I want stories to return to my daily life, not as an escape, but as nourishment. I want reading to be less of an aspiration and more of a rhythm, a steady presence that accompanies me through the ordinary and the profound alike.

Much like the blank pages of a new journal, a fresh digital space can feel full of possibility, inspiring and exciting.

Truthfully, I’ve been redesigning and coding a new version of aurooba.com for at least three years now (maybe more), and I’m still not done. Right now, it just isn’t a space that feels fun to write in or publish to. And I’m itching to write.

I’ve had this domain for a few years. It was meant for something else originally, but I shelved those plans and kept the domain anyway. So here we are: aurooba.blog is born, with the tentative title Working Notes.

I’ve done and been many things in my life. I’ve been lost, unlost, and everything in between. I’ve been many Auroobas. But one thread has stayed steady through every version of me: writing. Public or private, messy or polished, I’ve written my way through every up, down, plateau, rollercoaster, and tunnel. Writing is how I make sense of the world and myself.

And I always find my way back to blogging. To writing in public. To figuring things out in public.

I’m not here to write authoritative articles. I won’t promise a consistent set of topics. This is, well and truly, a blog: a place for my working notes on…Aurooba things, the stuff of my life.