Is grace something innate that you’re born with, or can it be practiced, learned, and mastered?

A few months ago I noticed a girl who started showing up to the dance studio at my gym at night, practicing alone with gold pom-poms, her phone in the corner playing YouTube dance tutorials.

She’d do the same moves every night, awkwardly, over and over. It didn’t seem like she was getting any better.

probably good cardio

I started going in the mornings and didn’t see her for a few months. Then I went back last night.

Before, she was trying to move around the studio. Now the studio moved around her. Kicks, flips, jumps, somersaults.

Same pom-poms.

Footnote: when I first wrote this essay it was a lot longer and I ended up trimming it quite a bit, but it may have lost of its original message. The backstory is: I remember reading/hearing/watching something where the takeaway was “when something is going to work, it will generally show signs of promise from the beginning.”

I think this is generally true. In the hidden markov model of early stage technology, where the goal is to “make something people want,” a project doesn’t normally go from “people don’t want this” to “you’re making something people want,” and when it does, it often becomes a pantomime. Like, “Slack started off as an MMORPG and they had a great internal messaging system.”

From my perspective, I just saw cheerleader practicing a few times. Maybe she pivoted, maybe she didn’t. But it was refreshing to see something so elegant that challenged my assumptions. Storytelling is great and powerful, words are useful as a means of communication, but maybe trying too hard to put something into words makes it lose some of its essence.