Talent Is A Myth: Worry About Something Else

Talent is a myth. It has nothing to do with it. Success is a skill. It’s awe-inspiring to see people—the athlete, musician, chess master, or master surgeon—possess extraordinary skill. And it’s easy to ascribe talent to their name. These people seem to be above and beyond what we mere mortals could attain. Centuries ago they would have been deemed blessed. Today they’re “talented”. The problem is the same: we think they have something we don’t.

A Pile Of Crap

Years ago, the consensus was that it was a blessing from the heavens and searching for the cause was forbidden. Instead, we were encouraged to believe such individuals were gifted. End of story. Present from birth. Genetically encoded. Bestowed from up there. That explains it quite nicely, doesn’t it? Others are predisposed to becoming highly skilled in their particular area. Born with it. They’re the math wizards, the novelists who spin up magical stories, the multilinguals who can say hello in a hundred tongues. They’re not us. They’re more.

At some point in our lives we’ve noticed some people are unusually good at certain things. The classmate who aced all his tests. The Olympians winning medals. The person who dripped with confidence and became an influential speaker. Someone along the way probably fed you that those people have a natural affinity, an inborn ability. They are full of shizzle. Wave that notion goodbye. It’s an excuse, one of the most noxious that people have deceived themselves into believing. Stretch the truth enough times, and people believe it.

Then Practice Some More

Talent is, at the core, a stupendous amount of conscious training. Effortful stuff. Sweat. And blood. And tears. There’s no gift. Without years of training, nobody would be “talented” at anything. Humans are remarkably similar. If you are of at least normal intelligence, congratulations. You are exactly like those people earning hundreds of times more than you, pulling sports achievements that leave you flabbergasted. Inborn talent might be part of it—as in one-to-three percent of the ordeal. The rest? Practice.

There’s no empirical evidence that talent exists. Period. Let alone that it’s a determinant of success. In fact, most top performers don’t start as “talented” until they’ve put in sufficient practice. And if they display standout performance at a young age, it’s because their parents had encouraged their abilities—or even put them through formal training—at an even younger age. Excellence is achieved when enough hours are put into deliberate practice. Not when the stars align and you’re the result of a perfect egg-and-sperm cocktail.

Ready To Race?

The kind of practice also matters. Get one-on-one boxing sessions for a year. You get pretty good. Okay. Skip forward. Five years later. What, are you an all-star, ready to compete in the world championship? No? Let’s skip further. Ten years. How good are you? Pretty good. Same as one year in. Why? Because you’re going to your boxing sessions to get the workout in while your coach trains you. You’re not engaging in what’s called deliberate practice—where superstars are made.

Deliberate practice is focused, purposeful, and systematic training that helps people develop skills and expertise in a particular area. It’s a key factor in achieving high levels of expertise in domains from sports and music, to chess, and other areas. Here’s an example. Driving. How long have you been driving? Years, right? More than ten, perhaps? You must be a race-ready driver then. Slap you into NASCAR and you’ll perform well, will you? Aha. Why not? Because upon learning the necessary driving skills to pass your exam, you stopped deliberately practicing—you stopped learning new and started relying on old skills.

Fall, Get Up, Don’t Fall The Same Way

It’s the process of continually identifying weaknesses, receiving feedback, and working systematically to improve yourself and reach your full potential. Deliberate practice quickly overtakes unstructured practice and, at one point, unstructured practice freezes altogether. That’s where inhumane levels of skill appear and everyone starts to call you a “prodigy”. The reality? Trial and error. You had a clear goal. You got feedback. You focused on intense, frequent repetition. And you went at it, day in and day out. “Talented”.

But you might disagree. After all, if any level of skill in any domain can be achieved by just practicing for a while, why are there so few Olympians and musical virtuosos? Deliberate practice is, by definition, hard. Requires significant effort, lifestyle changes, and balancing rest and peak productivity times. Imagine being fixated on one area for thousands of hours. It sounds like a mental disorder. Ask the guy who had, by age five, performed before European royalty, by seventeen, was a musician at a prestigious court.

Change The Way You Think

Enter Mozart. He’s a prime example of a life set up to attain one skill. Mozart was dedicated to deliberate practice from a fragile age. He started playing at three, receiving formal training from his father, also a renowned musician and composer. All of his education was structured around music. Rigorous training and opportunities to perform and compose were all around him. He knew notes better than we know letters. Countless of hours went into practice—not just practice, but hard, focused practice. That’s why, when we hear Mozart performed great as a child, we attribute it to talent. But the reality is, he’d already had years under his belt.

Maybe you still disagree. Then you’re a victim of what’s called the fixed mindset. It’s the belief that confirms talent, and that hard work isn’t enough to succeed. As a result of this thinking, people don’t try new and challenging things. Why try when it’s a hopeless race you can’t win, right? Why not stick to activities where you already have some skill? That’s what they think. You can think the same for intellect-related skills, creativity-related skills, or physical skills. When you don’t believe skill can be acquired, what’ll push you to practice—not to mention thousands of hours of hard practice?

The Conclusion

In the end, the talent concept can make you think certain abilities or domains are available to only a select few. Evidence doesn’t back it up. Don’t use it as an excuse. Be careful about talent with your kids: achievements should be framed as a result of work, not innate capability. “Everyone has talent…” said Erica Jong, “What's rare is the courage to follow it to the dark places where it leads.”