Deep Thoughts: Is talent Overrated?

“Talent does not play a role in achieving great performance”

First, let me say that I am fully aware that there are people who would be against the above statement. Also, I might not be able to state out my views clearly in order to strongly convince those on the other side of this argument but this is a journal of thoughts (albeit subjective) and you are free to air out your views too but that’s after reading mine.

Talent is defined as the natural ability to do something fairly specific better than most people can do it. It is innate; meaning one is born with it and if one is not born with it, it can’t be acquired.

By this definition, most of us believe that all those we see excelling so much at different things such as Tiger Woods, Bill Gates, Beyoncé, Mozart, Ronaldo, etc. are born with their specific talent. Thus we can only attain that level of greatness if we discover our talents too.

I was previously of that same school of thought. For years I had always sought my talent. I tried my hands at so many things. I was on a journey to discover my absolute talent. The one talent that will make me shine out to the world. I tried my hands at different things; singing, dancing, writing, public speaking, drawing, running, swimming, football, painting, beads making, basketball, programming, and knitting, etc. and even playing a few musical instruments. I will have you know that whenever I started, I did quite well, even made money or participated in competitions. However, one thing that was consistent in all of these things I listed was that I was never achieving great performance. That performance that leaves everybody wowing with their eyes looking glazed and their lips whispering ‘Oh what a talent… this person is a prodigy…’

Another thing was that I always lost interest after a while. I believed if I was talented in any of those skills, it would be natural for me to do excellently in them, after all, talent is innate. Then again whenever I reach that difficult place, I give up as I feel I don’t have the talent for it. I doomed myself to not having a single talent as I have tried my hand at everything. I knew I was good if I tried out something and practiced it but since those things are not my talent, I was never great at them.

Hey hey hey. Hold on a minute, I do not have low self-esteem. That was the old me talking so stop all your pity trips. I am on a different path and all it took to change was a little addiction to anime (Japanese animation and please anime is NOT cartoon!).

Gon is the main character in an anime called Hunter X Hunter. He needed to defeat an enemy by stealing the enemy’s badge and thought of a move to do so. He practiced the move more than ten thousand times from sun up the sun down. One move! One boring move! Ten thousand times! (Here is the move, throwing a fishing rod. See? Boring!).

This was my first cognisance of Deliberate Practice. The fact that he practiced so much to attain perfection in delivering that one move held me spellbound and opened up my mind to possibilities of what I could attain if I had that level of focus on practicing at a skill.

Again, I stumbled across the principle of 10,000 hours of apprenticeship to attain mastery and my thoughts were settled on this.

[bctt tweet=”It is not talent that causes one to achieve greatness but deliberate practice” username=”shalomtruthsmag”]

The great talents we hear, see and admire today are people that have put hours and hours on deliberate practice to become excellent in what they are known for.  Let’s cite an example; Tiger Woods from when he was eighteen months had already started learning about golf. His father was a teacher. He had enough years to put in more than 10,000 hours of apprenticeship. Here is another one; Mozart’s father thought him music right from an early age and honed his composing skills from when he was age three till he was well known for his masterpiece: Piano Concerto No 9, composed at age twenty-one. Eighteen years of practice. Bill Gates as well as Mark Zuckerberg had access to work on computers from when they were young. They all practiced and this practice is gruelling hard work but deliberate. And when greatness is achieved, to everyone else, it seems effortless because all we see is the already honed skill which we term as talent.

Needless to say, there is another side to this argument, where one has to look at IQ, EQ, hormones, genes, Etc. I might delve deep into this side of the argument another time but for now I shall conclude with this.

The quest of talent discovery made me overlook my laziness and ability to give up easily when the going got tough. Thus I have not achieved greatness in any of the skills I tried to learn. Seeing how great I shall become, I have to ditch that futile quest and focus on perfecting any skill I need to achieve greatness and pressing beyond the difficult zone through deliberate practice.

P.S. Why are my thoughts on talent this week you may ask? Well I picked up a book by Geoff Colvin titled Talent is Overrated. You should read it too. The book reminded me of my own thoughts on talent and how I am still slacking in the area of practice. I am still at Chapter two and I do pray I get enough drive to pick up my practice once again as I continue to read this book. If I do, you will hear all about it next week.

Jaa Mata!