Talent. It’s a pretty powerful word. If you have talent, then that’s great. What a lucky person you are – to be so talented at something! We speak of talented people as a different class of person. It’s synonymous with being gifted or special in some way. A gift is something you didn’t earn, but something that someone bestowed upon you. Something you were just lucky to acquire when some higher power was giving out gifts.
But, what does it mean then, if you’re not talented? If you got the short end of the stick when gifts were being handed out? Instead, you got coal in your stocking and the knowledge that, well, you were never destined for anything special. Not in this life anyway. No point trying anymore, I suppose.
Talent is a load of crap
Me? I’m lucky. I’m talented, people say. I’m so fortunate, people say. I’m different. Special. Not everyone can do what I can do, people say.
But what most people don’t know is how hard I work to do what I do. I think ‘talent’ is a load of crap. I think we’ve invented talent as a catch-all to give ourselves an excuse to stop pursuing things when they get a little harder than what we think they should be. Calling someone else ‘talented’ gives us a way out.
Talent equals strengths plus hard work
It’s widely acknowledged, at least in most literature on humanity, that every person on the planet comes with strengths and weaknesses. Some things we’re naturally good at, and others, well they require a bit more hard work if we want to improve them.
I’m comfortable with saying that one of my strengths is empathy. From very young, I’ve always had very high empathy. I’ve also got a heightened visual perception compared to other people who I’ve met in my life. I distinguish colours with a higher level of granularity than most people, and I notice shapes and colours that other people don’t seem to notice. It’s always been this way for me. I didn’t know it was a strength until I met people for whom this was a weakness.
When I frame my strengths like this, no one says, “You’re so talented at empathy,” or “You have a talent for noticing fine colour differences in everyday objects.” The ‘talent’ lies in art, music, sculpture. Creative pursuits that require a hell of a lot of… you guessed it, hard work.
As we learn in school, your strengths alone will only get you so far. Unless they’re honed (from advice from teachers, friends and others), and we put in the hours of practice to hone them, strengths, well, don’t do very much all by themselves.
But.
If we decide to work hard to refine our strengths, those strengths become SO strong that when they’re seen by others for whom it’s their weakness, it feels like something different to them. Something, how should I say, unattainable? And when something enters the realm of unattainable, we need a new word for that. Gift is one. Special is another. I’ve heard ‘blessed’, too, if they’re religious. And then there’s Talented.
Make yourself talented
So, how do you make yourself talented at something? Well, the first step is to know yourself. What are you good at? What do you generally do slightly better than anyone else without seeming to have to work at it? In my case, it’s empathy (which is also a weakness by the way but I can talk about that later). My visual perception is another strength.
Once you’ve identified your strength/s, then you have to work your butt off to turn them into something that is out of this world. Practice relentlessly and consume as much knowledge from books, mentors, classes or short courses as your body and mind can sustainably consume. ‘Sustainably’ is key here, burning yourself out won’t get you very far.
How you hone your strengths isn’t easy (in fact, it’s actually the hard part), but it’s the part that turns strength into a ‘talent’. It’s the part that tricks people into believing that they simply can’t do this superhuman thing that you seem to pull off so effortlessly.