Who needs talent when you have intense emotions?
The music player Jack Black, on the DVD that came with the School of Rock show , answered in an interview as follows:
I learned how to play a little electric guitar because my forte is playing wood guitar. I'm still not a good electric guitar player. And in fact, I am not a good guitar player, but I always play with the most intense emotion.
It is hard to judge whether he is telling the truth or not until you hear (or better yet) Jack Black's Tenacious D band performs. In terms of music, they play very badly. But they still create a very entertaining and often fun show.
Who needs talent when you have intense emotions?
I recalled Jack Black's statement while reading a great article called "It's not about you" on the blog Creating Passionate Users:
I'm not important in creating a plan to introduce myself, but just starting with a teaching test on the principle that "it's not about YOU". I have instructed the entire 5-day course with all my energy to devote to making THEM (students) smarter, instead of trying to prove to students that I am a person how smart (It's a clever and necessary strategy, because I'm not a very smart person either.)
That year-long trial was a success, and I won a reward from Sun for being one of the only four faculty in this North American region to receive guest reviews. Highest possible item. But the most noticeable point about this is that it happened even though I'm not a particularly good instructor or a Java master. I have shown that a very average teacher can also take unusual results by placing the ENTIRE focus on the students. I don't care if they think I know much.
And when I said that I was a medium-class instructor, it was really an exaggeration. I have almost no presentation skills. When I started working at Sun, I thought that I would be fired because I refused to use the slides and only based on the whiteboard (where I painted most of the confusing objects and passages code unreadable). But … I mean average when you value me for the frame of reference is the presentation skills of a traditional classroom lecturer.
The skills that I believe most of them are bullshit anyway. Assuming you set a very minimum threshold in teaching, the most important thing is that you help your students become smarter. You help them learn … by doing whatever they can. And not the things that come out of your mouth, but the things that happen between their ears (students). You, as a teacher, must design and allow situations that are the cause of the situation. Exercises, labs, debates, discussions, lots of interaction. In other words, these are things that THEY do, not the things YOU do (except you create those scripts).
These inspirational results reflect my feelings about the conditions necessary to become a "good" programmer. Don't be scared when there are thousands of more talented developers than you. Who needs talent when you have intense emotions?