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"But then came a guy who wasn’t interested in lying, who wanted to do stuff that was hard because he could. This was his power in the world and he wanted to exe

"But then came a guy who wasn’t interested in lying, who wanted to do stuff that was hard because he could. This was his power in the world and he wanted to exert it — the basic impulse of any athlete. Yet he never really found his audience, even though he conquered juggling’s demands like no one before him. Gatto learned how to stand calm and straight-backed beneath sick, dizzying multitudes of spinning, arcing objects and conduct them with model-train precision into his hands. He also learned to charm people, even though it didn’t come naturally to him, as the kiss-the-ball video shows. He gave in. He grew to accept the necessity of kissing the ball and lobbing it gently into the crowd with a grin. He also learned to make hard tricks look hard, to pantomime the exertion and self-doubt of a man working at the edge of his ability even though his ability stretched on and on. He learned to entertain, because for some reason, even though we exist in a physical universe defined by the relative attractive powers of massive objects, the mere demonstration of a lush and lovely control of gravity is not enough. He labored to please an audience that could never appreciate his greatness. Then he got older and watched a new wave of jugglers abandon the stage for the flicker of computer screens, sneering at the bright-light mastery he’d worked so hard to gain. That’s my impression, anyway. Gatto didn’t talk to me. Maybe he wants to focus on running his business. Or maybe he got so used to performing for people who couldn’t understand his gift that when he decided to back away from juggling, he felt no need to help them understand why."

gumby 10y ago
In case you can't tell, hownottowrite posted a perfect TL;DR, being a couple of paragraphs from the end of the article.
bambax 10y ago
Two paragraphs before he says this that explains a lot of his frustration IMHO: > Jugglers don’t have to perform difficult tricks to entertain people, because audiences generally don’t know what’s difficult. Juggling five objects is 10 times harder than juggling four, and six objects is 10 times harder than five, but to most people, five objects in the air looks like six, and six looks like five. A truly difficult juggling trick doesn’t necessarily register intuitively as difficult. It just looks like a bunch of weird shit crossing in the air. That I think has two consequences (that the author alludes to btw): 1- You're working hard to please a crowd of clueless chumps that you have no respect for. 2- You're vulnerable to hacks who can impress the public with easy tricks and are a hundred times or a thousand times less talented than you, and who don't even work hard. Sometimes being too good makes it impossible to go on.
- zardeh 10y ago
  > You're vulnerable to hacks who can impress the public with easy tricks and are a hundred times or a thousand times less talented than you, and who don't even work hard. This I think has led to something interesting. Most proficient (and by proficient in this case I mean capable of juggling more than 5 balls) jugglers are either young, or relatively old. The top 10 this year were all born after 1990, and some are significantly younger (<18).

gumby 10y ago

In case you can't tell, hownottowrite posted a perfect TL;DR, being a couple of paragraphs from the end of the article.

bambax 10y ago

Two paragraphs before he says this that explains a lot of his frustration IMHO: > Jugglers don’t have to perform difficult tricks to entertain people, because audiences generally don’t know what’s difficult. Juggling five objects is 10 times harder than juggling four, and six objects is 10 times harder than five, but to most people, five objects in the air looks like six, and six looks like five. A truly difficult juggling trick doesn’t necessarily register intuitively as difficult. It just looks like a bunch of weird shit crossing in the air. That I think has two consequences (that the author alludes to btw): 1- You're working hard to please a crowd of clueless chumps that you have no respect for. 2- You're vulnerable to hacks who can impress the public with easy tricks and are a hundred times or a thousand times less talented than you, and who don't even work hard. Sometimes being too good makes it impossible to go on.

zardeh 10y ago
> You're vulnerable to hacks who can impress the public with easy tricks and are a hundred times or a thousand times less talented than you, and who don't even work hard. This I think has led to something interesting. Most proficient (and by proficient in this case I mean capable of juggling more than 5 balls) jugglers are either young, or relatively old. The top 10 this year were all born after 1990, and some are significantly younger (<18).