By Jane Sonnenschein · July 21, 2026

“Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.” — often attributed to W. B. Yeats

A few days ago, I wrote an essay called Have We Been Reading Shāng Zhòngyǒng Wrong All Along?[1]

After it was published, one reader left a thoughtful comment:

“Why must talent not be wasted? Why does it have to lead to success? Why can’t someone just be an ordinary person?”

When I read that, my first reaction was not to argue. It was to realize that we may have understood the phrase “don’t waste talent” in very different ways from the very beginning.

In many people’s imagination, once a child is seen as gifted, that child must then enter a harder road: more training, higher expectations, better results than other people, and finally success in some field.

If none of that happens, people say with regret that the child wasted their talent.

If that is how we understand it, then “not wasting talent” really does become a heavy demand. It starts to sound as if the moment someone is a little smarter or more capable than others, they lose the right to live an ordinary life, and must hand in a bright enough life report in return for their ability.

But that is not what talent means to me.

To me, talent is not a ticket to success. Nor is it a debt that must be repaid in the form of rankings, income, or social status.

Talent simply means that, in some things, a person enters the state more easily than most people, understands faster, and more naturally draws interest, satisfaction, and inner motivation from it.

And “not wasting talent” does not mean forcing someone to become successful. It means not letting them lose, too early, their connection with the things they are genuinely good at and genuinely love.

I

I often tell my daughter that I do not want to waste her gift for languages.

Sometimes she complains: “Why are my classmates all playing while I still have to learn three languages? Why don’t they have to do this, but I do?”

Objectively speaking, she does not lack free time. Compared with many children her age in China, she actually has plenty of it. But compared with the German children around her, she does have a bit more to learn.

Besides German at school, she also has to maintain her English and Chinese. Chinese especially has a long distance between listening and speaking on the one hand, and reading and writing on the other. Just because a child can speak it does not mean they will naturally become literate in it or learn to write it.

If “not wasting talent” is understood as “parents desperately wanting their child to succeed,” then my insistence that she continue learning Chinese may look like a kind of utilitarian push.

But that is not what it is.

When my daughter was little, learning to listen and speak Chinese and English was not a painful process. She did not sit there every day memorizing huge lists of words, and she did not master the languages through constant testing. For her, these languages were simply part of life.

She can quickly hear subtle differences between languages, and she switches naturally between them. Compared with many children her age, she really does have a clear advantage in language learning.

That advantage is not something I imagined into existence. Nor is it something I insist on seeing just because she is my child. It is something that can be observed again and again in everyday life over a long period of time.

She learns more easily than others, and she picks things up faster.

If that is the case, why should I, in the name of “children should have it easy,” simply let that ability remain at the most superficial level of listening and speaking, and then slowly disappear as her language environment changes?

II

Of course, having a gift for languages does not mean reading and writing will happen naturally and effortlessly too.

My daughter also went through a bottleneck in Chinese reading. She could understand and speak, but because her literacy was still limited, she could not enter a more complex world of written language. Some topics she could understand perfectly well in conversation felt unfamiliar the moment they became written text.

Later, as her literacy gradually increased, she slowly crossed that threshold in reading.

What truly still needs practice now is writing.

Writing Chinese characters is not the same ability as understanding spoken Chinese. A person may have a very good memory and be able to recognize a character in their mind, but that does not mean they can write it accurately without practice.

It is like someone with a rich store of knowledge. That does not automatically make them a good teacher.

When I was at university, I once had a lecturer like that. He obviously had enough professional knowledge, or he could not have been standing at a university lectern. But in class, he sat there expressionless and just read from his slides. The whole lecture lacked explanation, rhythm, and interaction, and it made people drowsy.

The issue was not that he lacked knowledge. The issue was that “having knowledge” and “passing knowledge on to others” are two different abilities.

In the same way, language sensitivity, oral expression, reading comprehension, and writing are not the same thing either. Being strong in one does not automatically replace the practice required for another.

A truly gifted person may need less practice than others in order to learn something well. But a person who needs no practice at all is, in the end, extremely rare.

So when I give my daughter a little push in Chinese reading and writing, it is not because I expect her to become a linguist, a writer, or some worldly version of a successful person. It is because a nine-year-old child cannot yet carry the long-term consequences of a choice on her own.

Today, she may want to give up simply because writing feels repetitive or boring. But later, when she truly wants to read Chinese books, understand Chinese culture, or speak more deeply with family in Chinese, that road may already have become very difficult.

What parents call “giving a little push” is often not deciding a child’s whole life for them. It is helping them cross the basic threshold that even talent alone cannot automatically cross, during the stage when they are still too young to judge long-term consequences clearly.

III

Part of the reason people confuse developing talent with forcing success is that we often treat “effort” and “pain” as if they were the same thing.

When someone spends a long time doing something difficult, outsiders easily assume they must be enduring, sacrificing, or suffering.

But for someone who truly loves a certain field, that is not the whole story.

A person who is genuinely strong at mathematics and genuinely loves it may spend more than ten hours thinking through one hard problem. For someone who dislikes math, that would be almost torture. But the excitement, satisfaction, and sense of achievement that person feels when they finally solve it are also things an outsider cannot easily understand.

From the outside, it looks exhausting: sitting at a desk for more than ten hours. But from the inside, those hours may feel like deep immersion, the loss of time, even joy.

We cannot assume that just because we do not enjoy something, anyone who gives themselves to it for a long time must be suffering.

Of course, talent does not automatically bring interest either. A person may be good at something and still not want to turn it into a career. They may choose to keep it as a hobby, or they may choose an entirely different path in adulthood.

What truly deserves respect is whether they have a choice.

If a child loves drawing and clearly has strong visual expression, but their parents think drawing is useless and never provide materials or opportunities; if a child loves taking machines apart and is deeply curious about structure and principles, but adults only interpret that behavior as mischief; if a child is highly sensitive to language, but because those around them find it inconvenient, they end up keeping only the most basic ability to communicate — those are the situations I mean by “waste.”

What gets wasted is not a future ranking, nor some future successful person who might have existed.

What gets wasted is a deep connection a person might have built between their inner interests and their natural abilities.

IV

So where exactly is the line between developing a child’s talent and forcing a child to succeed?

I think the difference lies not in whether the parents ask something of the child, and not in whether the child sometimes feels tired. It lies in whom that push is really serving.

If parents push a child only to satisfy their own vanity — if they want the child to prove that their education worked, to beat others, to enter a prestigious school, to earn more money — then talent easily becomes a beautifully packaged kind of pressure.

The better the child does, the higher the parents’ demands become. The moment the child slows down, they are accused of wasting their gifts.

In that kind of relationship, talent is no longer the child’s ability. It becomes the parents’ reason for collecting a debt.

But there is another kind of push.

That is when adults truly see a child’s interest and strengths, and they also see the laziness, bottlenecks, and short-sightedness that naturally appear in growth. So at the right moments, they provide structure, resources, and the kind of persistence that is sometimes necessary.

That kind of push does not require the child to become somebody in particular. It does not turn every exercise into a graded performance. It simply helps the child get through the basic stage that cannot be completed by temporary interest alone, but that every deeper path requires.

When my daughter is doing crafts, she can spend hours exploring on her own without anyone pushing her. That is her interest and inner drive.

But when she writes Chinese characters, sometimes she finds it repetitive and boring, and she needs my reminders and companionship. That does not prove she has no talent for languages. And it does not prove that I am violating her will or forcing her toward success.

Interest can bring a person to the doorway. But it cannot always finish all the foundational training on its own.

Any ability that moves from “I like this” to “I truly have command of this” will pass through parts that are not especially fun. Music requires basic exercises. Drawing requires learning line and structure. Writing requires reading, revising, and long-term accumulation. Sports also require repetition.

We cannot expect a child to spend the whole course of growing up doing only what feels enjoyable in the moment. And we should not interpret every unpleasant feeling as harm.

What we truly need to watch for is not whether a child occasionally feels tired, annoyed, or unwilling to practice. It is long-term fear, humiliation, denial, and the loss of the right to choose.

V

“Why can’t someone just be an ordinary person?”

Of course they can.

A person with a gift for mathematics does not have to become a mathematician. Someone good at writing does not have to publish a single piece of work. Someone with a strong sense of music can simply sing and play in their own life.

Being an ordinary person is not failure.

But an ordinary life does not mean a person must actively give up what they are good at and what they love.

We often imagine “success” and “ordinary” as two completely opposite options: if you do not pursue worldly success, then you should not strive for anything, should not persist in anything, and should ideally remain forever relaxed, without training or difficulty of any kind.

But ordinary life in the real world also requires ability, effort, and choice.

To sustain relationships, complete work, and take care of yourself, you still need to learn many things. There is no life worth living that asks nothing of you in return.

What matters is not how high a person finally stands. What matters is whether the effort they give still has something to do with how their life feels from the inside.

A person may never become famous, wealthy, or exceptional in the eyes of others. But they may still feel full and alive because they understood a difficult problem, finished something they made with their hands, mastered a language, or wrote a piece of text that truly expressed them.

That kind of joy may never be seen by the world. But it is not less important just because it is unseen.

VI

So when I say I do not want to waste my child’s talent, I am not saying that she must use three languages to exchange for some particular career. Nor am I designing for her a life path that leads to success.

What I mean is simply this: since she has this ability, and since our family happens to have this language environment, I am willing to spend the time to help her keep that ability alive.

When she grows up, she can decide what place these languages should occupy in her life.

She may turn Chinese and English into professional abilities, or she may simply use them to read, travel, and communicate with family. She may even choose, for a period of adulthood, not to use them much at all.

But at least then, she will be choosing after having possessed them — not trying to reinterpret a loss as “I never really needed it anyway,” simply because no one helped her cross the threshold of reading and writing in childhood.

What I hope to give my child is not a task of “you must succeed.” It is more real choices.

The purpose of developing talent is not to process an ordinary child into an extraordinary person. It is to give a person the chance to know themselves more fully: What am I good at? What do I enjoy? What am I willing to invest myself in? And what kind of difficulty am I willing to bear for it?

Whether that person becomes successful in the end, or even whether they turn that ability into a career, is not the only answer.

What is truly sad is not that a gifted person may finally live an ordinary life. It is that before they even had the chance to know what they truly loved and what they were capable of doing, they were already separated from the most alive part of themselves through adult misunderstanding, neglect, or excessive control.

Of course a person can choose an ordinary life. But before making that choice, they should at least have the chance to know themselves, and the chance to walk a little closer to that path.

So what should not be lightly wasted is never only the rare and visible kind of talent that shines in a few children. It is also the quieter abilities in every child — the ones that may not fit a single standard, but may help them find their place in life.

Parents may not be able to map out one absolutely correct road for a child. But they can at least observe carefully: What helps this child focus more easily? What do they understand with unusual speed? What kind of difficulty are they still willing to return to again and again? What do they move toward on their own, even without reward?

These small signs may not immediately turn into grades, but they may be closer than any report card to what that child may one day truly rely on for the long term.

Education is not about sending every child through the same door. It is about staying with them long enough to slowly see which door fits them better.

Behind that door may not be worldly success.

But it may be a life with less self-doubt, and a life a person is more willing to keep living over the long run.

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Notes

[1] Shāng Zhòngyǒng（伤仲永）: A well-known classical Chinese prose text by Wang Anshi from the Song dynasty. It tells the story of a child prodigy, Fang Zhongyong, whose early brilliance fades because his talent is not properly nurtured. In modern Chinese, the story is often used as a shorthand warning against “wasting talent,” though people may interpret its meaning in different ways.

This essay is also available in other languages:

Chinese version: 为什么不能“浪费天赋”？因为发展天赋并不等于逼一个人成功

German version: Warum sollte man Begabung nicht „verschwenden“? Weil Förderung nicht bedeutet, einen Menschen zum Erfolg zu zwingen