Lucky

Despite my fer­vent desires to the con­trary, John Key has­n’t done much wrong in his first two weeks as PM but I was dis­ap­poin­ted with this com­ment about Flight of the Conchords, quoted in Stuff this morning:

“I think they are great actu­ally,” he said of the Grammy Award win­ning artists. “They are a great example of a Kiwi export that ends up being picked up on the world stage … they are tak­ing a bit of humour and music to the world. We are lucky to have such tal­en­ted indi­vidu­als.”

Does Key really think that pro­du­cing this sort of tal­ent (and the glob­al reach and ambi­tion that is also required) is a res­ult of luck? Or is it more to do with the dra­mat­ic increase in sup­port of our cre­at­ive sec­tor over the last nine years, sup­port and com­mit­ment that allowed tal­ent like Bret and Jemaine to con­sider careers here and over­seas. If it’s just about luck, why sup­port our artists at all?

This reminds me of a story told to me by F&S com­menter Gary H. He was a reliev­ing teach­er at Parkway Intermediate in Wainuiomata and some­times played gui­tar and sang songs in class. In the staff room one day anoth­er teach­er said, “Gary, you’re so lucky you can play that gui­tar in class” and he thought to him­self, I taught myself to play it and prac­ticed for hours and hours to get good at it. Luck has noth­ing to do with it.