Every now and then, I come across a professional creative throwing a fit about people using the word “talent.” These rants tend to fall along the lines of, “Talent isn’t real; you work really hard and learn to do the thing.” I saw another of these recently, and it made me decide to pull this topic off my ideas list and give it a go.
Because you know what? Bullshit.
Black and White
What’s most surprising about this familiar cry is that it comes, more often than not, from visual artists, in particular people who can draw. (Not saying most artists make this complaint, mind you, just that most people I hear say it are artists.) I find that surprising because an artist, more than anyone else, should have a better grasp on shades of grey than that.
But maybe not metaphorically?
Because here’s the thing: Yes, it takes a lot of work to learn learn the basics of a creative skill, and then to hone it into something others are willing to pay money to enjoy. But just because it requires work doesn’t mean a person can’t also have a particular talent.
Talent does not mean picking up a pencil, a paintbrush, a violin, a hammer, a whatever and magically demonstrating a level of skill other people would have to work years to develop. Talent doesn’t mean there’s no effort. And telling someone they have talent doesn’t mean you’re saying they didn’t work at it.
Passion and Patience
I think there are several layers that go into talent, the most common ones being passion and patience. Or maybe the patience actually comes from the passion. Here’s what I mean:
I can sort of draw. If I spend a couple of hours practicing every day, after about two weeks my attempts start to become passable. Not great, but passable. If I keep it up longer, I get better. (And if I stop practicing, I lose everything I’ve gained, very quickly.) If I were to keep up the practice, and do the work of taking some classes, or at least watching some instructional videos, I’d learn even more and get even better.
But do I practice two hours a day? Or any hours a day? I do not. This is because I lack the passion for drawing that would make the work tolerable. I don’t enjoy drawing enough to make the effort required to get good at it worth it to me. I love art, and would love to be able to produce excellent works of art, but I lack the passion to drive me to make the effort, and to push through the tedium of the hours spent not producing quality results.
Also, My first attempts when I start are horrible, and it discourages me. If I did a little better in those early efforts, that would give me less impatience in the first place. Encouraging early results are a lot of what drive a person forward in developing a skill.
That ability to produce encouraging early results is talent. Saying a person has talent doesn’t mean they haven’t made any effort. It means the skill in question likely comes a bit easier for them than for the average person, which will have given them the encouragement to put in the work and get really good at it. It also likely gives them the ability to get better than just putting in the work ultimately would.
And having a passion for what they’re doing makes all that effort feel more worth it.
Everyone Is Talented
What I really don’t get about people who take offense at being told they’re talented is that everyone has talents. I don’t think it’s possible not to understand what talent is, because we all have it, so I don’t see why some people rail against it so much.
Think about your own life, and all the things you’ve learned to do over the years. Not just creative skills, but everything. Were you particularly good at math in school, or maybe English or Science? Were you good at one sport but not great at another? Maybe you’re a great cook but plants die as soon as you walk into the room.
These are talents. Yes, anybody can learn to do math by studying and drilling and hammering the information into their heads, but for some, numbers just make sense. These people still have to learn the rules, still have to do the practice sets and work through the different disciplines, but things make sense more readily as they go along.
I’m terrible at math; I had no idea what was going on starting at Algebra I, and it was mostly just downhill from there. I excelled at English, though. A broken grammar rule hits my ear like a clinker note with absolutely no effort whatsoever. And yet, I did have to learn those rules. I had to learn proper sentence structure, punctuation, how to format various forms of written communications.
But I loved it, so the work wasn’t the torture for me it was for most of my classmates. When I was in the sixth grade, we did an economics unit that involved earning fake in-class money that we could then use to buy things from little businesses we each set up in our classroom. One of the kids’ dad had some sort of job that gave him access to boxes and boxes of 45 rpm records of current hit singles, and I wanted them all. We could do extra homework for extra classroom cash, and I racked up a fortune by doing literally every exercise in our entire English textbook over the course of a couple of weekends.
Most people would have considered that pure torture. And, the truth is, it was just as much work for me as it would have been for them, but I loved every second of it. Partly because I had a passion for English that allowed me to enjoy the time and effort and partly because the rules of grammar, punctuation, and writing make sense to me readily. In other words, I have a talent for the English language.
Everyone has at least one thing they’re really good at. Not without trying, but without having to try as hard as everybody else, and without hating the work as much as others might.
This is talent.
Defensiveness
I guess some people hear “wow, you’re really talented” and mentally translate it to “wow, you’re so lazy!” And maybe some people actually mean it that way; I’ve certainly met my share of shallow thinkers.
But really, when most people say “you’re very talented,” what they mean is that you’re very good at the thing you’re doing. It’s a compliment. And “I wish I could do that, too” doesn’t always (or even often) include an unspoken “but I’d have to try, where you obviously don’t,” attached at the end. I strongly believe the vast majority of people do understand that even the most talented people also work at the thing they’re talented at.
Nobody’s born writing symphonies, painting masterpieces, or writing bestsellers. But that doesn’t mean we aren’t all born more likely to manage one of those things, or something else, than the other two.
So, that’s my rant about talent. Everybody has it, it isn’t a magic bullet, and, for the vast majority of is, saying someone has talent is not the same as saying that person never worked for anything they have.
Maybe some people just lack a talent for understanding?
