Student: How can one realize his Self-nature? I know so little about the subject.
Yasutani: First of all, you must be convinced you can do so. The conviction creates determination, and the determination zeal. But if you lack conviction, if you think ‘maybe I can get it, maybe I can’t’, or even worse, ‘This is beyond me!’ - you won’t awaken no matter how much you do zazen.
Examples:
“Take Rodney Mullen. He’s a real genius,” she says. Mullen is not a figure from science or medicine. He is, in fact, a legendary skateboarder, famous for inventing mind-blowing tricks that previously seemed impossible. One of them is actually called the “impossible”. “He executes these movements that defy reason, films them, and publishes them on YouTube,” Kim says. “And inevitably, within a few weeks, someone will send him a clip saying: This kid can do it better than you. He gave that trick everything he had, he’s pulling from all of his experience, and here’s this kid who picks it up in a matter of weeks. Because he learned that it’s possible to do that. Rodney just acts as a conduit. He breaks barriers of disbelief.”
As useful as intelligence is as a predictor of accomplishment, it is clearly far from the whole story; as Galton, Roe, Simonton, Eysenck, and many others have noted, personality and motivation appear to be the next biggest factors - great accomplishments or discovers are often made by the extremely hardworking and motivated, who are never satisfied with what they have done and go far beyond what any reasonable person would and are obsessed and occasionally quite unpleasant and unhappy people; why, for example, would anyone continue taking the absurd risks that successful billionaires often must to become billionaires, going to the roulette wheel and repeatedly betting everything on black, when anyone else would have been amply satisfied with tens or hundreds of millions of dollars (merely more money than they could spend in a lifetime)—unless there was something at least a little bit wrong with them?