Discipline, Talent and Time

Discipline may not be a substitute for talent but talent evaporates without it.

He wasn't talented but he did treat things gently, patiently and took his own time to understand them and get familiar with them. Ask him something all of a sudden and he'd look lost. Give him few minutes and he'd be ready to impress you with his response. He had this genuine interest in understanding how things work rather than be prepared with tailor made responses to situations. Perhaps, at the age of 14 itself he had understood that nothing is permanent, everything changes.
He wasn't disciplined, he hardly followed a time table, except for the school time table which he had to. He too his own sweet time doing things. Once he was forced to finish off something before the deadline and he did. All other deadlines were excused for him so that he could meet this deadline. The teachers were rather surprised though. They could clearly see the drop in quality of this work as compared to his previous submissions, which often happened few days later. Some teachers were fine with his late submissions because they marveled at his output but some thought that special treatment to one student could mean partiality which eventually authorities were not ready to do. Poor chap, he suffered due to this.

So, in a conventional sense, he was neither talented, nor disciplined. But he was both, yes he was!
You could call him talented, his talent lies in his perspective, his approach towards things, situations.You could call him disciplined, when doing one thing, he paid complete attention to that thing only. He never compromised with this time and attention to his work. He overshot deadlines only because he knew he could do better and only when that zenith of perfection is achieved that he is ready to proudly claim that work as his own.
Perhaps we end up defining discipline and talent wrongly! Why do we have to use time to define discipline and talent?