Nova Daily - 30 May 2025: Invisible effort

Hi!

Earlier today I was asked the question how I was able to do what I do, which is to write a blog daily in the way that I do. Usually I'd answer to any of those questions with just two words, but it did have me thinking a little bit.

Invisible effort

Pablo Picasso was sitting in a café in Spain, biding his time, doodling on a napkin he had together with his order. An admirer saw him and asked him if she could have the napkin. "Sure, ma'am," Picasso said, "that'll be 20 000 dollars."

Understandably shocked, the woman pointed out the obvious. "WHAT?! But you only took two minutes to draw that!"

Picasso then pointed out the not-quite-obvious but truer reality of the matter. "No, ma'am," he said, "it took me over sixty years to draw this."

Some different versions of this story circulate. The price differs from version to version, the story is sometimes situated in Paris, or the café becomes a restaurant. These details don't matter for the overall moral of the story. The point of the outrageously high price isn't that Picasso found the napkin anything special: according to the version of the story as told in Mark Manson's The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck, Picasso was about to throw it away when he was approached. The point is that he knew what price tag to put upon himself.

Sometimes you will meet people that have a very inflated sense of self. Artists are notorious with this, but online life-coaches will do this as well. By putting a high price tag onto themselves, they send the subtext message that they and whatever efforts they deliver on your behalf are high-quality and worth paying for.

Whether this is justified is beyond what I wanted to discuss here. What I wanted to single out here is that prior to having drawn that napkin, Picasso had spent decades upon decades to learn how to work his art.

In the below clip, starting at 2:30, Sasha Grischuk echoes Picasso's sentiment in a very humourous way.

There is a lot of work that goes into mastering your craft. If someone makes a difficult thing seem easy, that's because they spent so much time in making it seem effortless. There is a lot of work that went into the process before you saw the result.

A thought on the opening

In my case, when I'm writing, there is a lot of work that I've already done before I sat down to write my text. You don't see the time it took me to read and re-read and listen to Robert Greene's books, or the Harry Potter saga. If I'm writing what the key strategic factor in about any Sicilian is, I could charge a lot of cash for the years of studying that it has taken me to arrive at that conclusion. The answer to the question why black normally plays 3...c5 in the Advance French could have a similar fate.

10 days ago I asked for an analysis question in one of my blogs. I thought it'd be good to provide an answer to my analysis question.

There's a lot that goes under the surface. And to paraphrase Grischuk: I've worked on this example for all my life.