How do you get to Carnegie hall?

Between growing up with the word “gifted” thrown at my head every five minutes and having the vocabulary of an academic by the age of twelve, I’ve always assumed myself to be quite clever. Sidenote: the word “clever” is brilliant. It implies a certain amount of intelligence without arrogance or what I scientifically class as “wankery”. Eight year olds are clever. The Doctor is clever. Meanwhile, in Trinity College, students are “bright” or “academic”, two words I absolutely cannot stand. It’s all in the language, folks. Use wankery terms and you will sound like a wanker, even if you’re not. Trust me, I know from experience.) Things came naturally to me – drama and storywriting in primary school, progressing to learning vocab and essay writing in secondary. Academics were easy-peasy in my head. I never really had to do much to be good at them. That’s not to say I didn’t work. The Junior and Leaving Certs. were four years of coffee fuelled toil for me — but I did extraordinarily well in both. Particularly in the latter, when I did so well that I got into Trinity College. Oooh, Trinity. Fancy.

That was almost a year ago. Maybe it’s listening to the current crop of LC students moan about poets and papers, but I’ve been thinking about one particular element necessary to exam (and possibly life) success. Practise.
Maybe it’s because it’s nine am but practise seems something that I, as a so-called “talented youth” never quite did. All my life I could just…do things. Things just got done. Spellings were just in my head. From a school point of view, I just knew things without much effort. It’s not that I  never had to try, I just didn’t have to try hard.
So anyway. What started out in my head as a SpunOut style article aimed at banishing procrastination has propelled me to new heights of narcissism. Shocker. What occured to me lately was this: nineteen years of free-livin’ has caught up with me. I have now reached a stage where a bit of practise wouldn’t go astray. For instance, writing. This summer I want to get into writing. I have a ton of ideas for what to write, and where to send said writing – but I can’t bring myself to write them. Why? Because I don’t want them to be rejected. I want them to be good from the word go, without me doing any actual work. That’s the curse of the interminably lazy former clever kid.
It’s the same deal with exercise. I’ve always been very, very lazy in this department but I’d love to be able to be fitter and a bit more…toned or something. I’m not sure how to describe it. This morning, I thought I’d go for a run, but I envisioned myself a sweaty, scarlet mess after 100m. I’ll never get fit cos I don’t want to practise.
How do you get over an irrational fear of working for something until you get good, when you’ve always been vaguely good? And how do you prevent your blogposts from derailing into a crazy train of narcissism? Christ.