Rising Above That Darn Talent Trap
I have to believe that humans have the remarkable ability to learn and grow by developing a multitude of new skills and experience new things because if I didn’t believe that, when I was in a hospital bed unable to talk, or walk, or eat on my own, my prospects would have been quite slim indeed. Thank goodness for our amazing ability to learn. Talents aren’t just given. They’re earned.
I’ve heard a lot of people express their wish that they were talented in some desired way whether that might be: writing, singing, playing the guitar, fly fishing, being more athletic, and so on. I know what people are actually saying when they express that wish. They wish that they were good enough at that skill right in that moment that they would feel proud to share their byproduct of their efforts with the world. And for a lot of people, reaching that threshold is a pretty high bar.
I think that maybe I have a different perspective on our ability to learn new skills because I’ve had to re-learn how to do most things at least once in my life and in some cases twice. First as a toddler as most of us do, but then again after my initial brain injury, and then, for a lot of skills, yet again after my last set of brain surgeries when I was seventeen years old. Getting good enough to share a skill set with others might have something to do with talent but I would dare say it’s a very small component out of a much larger picture of our true possibilities.
One reason why I think we sometimes jump to the conclusion that people that are good at something have some God-given abilities that we just haven’t been blessed with is because we don’t see all of the work that goes into developing that talent. We see the external result of potentially thousands of hours dedicated to becoming proficient at a skill. When we eat a delicious meal, we eat the external ramifications of the skills that have been developed by the cook. We don’t see any of those hours an hours of painstaking work that that cook went through to learn how to balance the nuances of spices and how to manage multiple meal items simultaneously or how to manage a kitchen full of other cooks. We just enjoy the end result: the meal.
But if we were to be able to take a snapshot of those practice sessions that went into developing a talent, I think that we would see that there are steps that all of us could take that could lead towards having whatever talent we desire. The question is how much do we want that talent? If we want it badly enough, and if we have the discipline to continue to practice even when it’s not fun and before we actually get proficient enough to gain a lot of satisfaction out of sharing our gift with the world, then eventually we will end up with some good skills. It’s like that with everything.
It always breaks my heart to see young kids grow to that age where they start to realize that other people are perhaps better at certain things than they are. I think we all remember those experiences in elementary school where we thought that we were great artists until we saw our classmates fine sketch. Or we might think that we are a great soccer player until we see our teammate who can run circles around us. I wish that kids at that age were required to go through a developmental course in elementary school where teachers taught kids why one student might be better at some thing than another and rather than assuming that we are fated to be good at some things and less good at other things, we were taught what it takes to improve at the skills that we desire to get good at. In that way developing talents becomes more of a quest rather than a luck of the draw.
I definitely don’t mean to belittle the amount of effort it takes to be “performance ready” at a skill. But I think another reason why our view of talent might be warped a bit, so much so that a lot of us never even try out new skills or activities at all, is because we generally only see the performance level demonstrated. But the reality is that we can gain so much satisfaction from developing smaller-level skills in arenas that interest us that we just do for ourselves. We can learn to sing a favorite song, or to play the piano, or paint a picture, or take a cooking class, or dance just because the movement resonates inside of us. We are all artists and soccer players and writers and creative animals burgeoning with hopeful desires to express what we feel and see. Getting noticed by some professional rating guild might be fulfilling, but it certainly is not a prerequisite to trying out something that appeals to you. I still play the trumpet even though I am clearly not philharmonic material.
I have to believe that humans have the remarkable ability to learn and grow by developing a multitude of new skills and experience new things because if I didn’t believe that, when I was in a hospital bed unable to talk, or walk, or eat on my own, my prospects would have been quite slim indeed. Thank goodness for our amazing ability to learn. Talents aren’t just given. They’re earned.