Talent in this sense being a natural ability that you excel at. Some call it a gift also. Anywho, does anyone here think that everyone has a talent like the fluffy self help types claim? Personally I say no. There is no natural ability, you develop it.
I disagree with your last sentence. Not everyone has a natural ability, but many do.
Maybe, but a lot of people also have stage-fright, which means they might not ever develop any talents, nor display them if a natural talent exists.
Some have the ability to start interesting threads…
I’d say “yes” in at least two different ways.
Firstly, we all do things that require a great deal of skill every day: as someone learning a foreign language I can testify that learning a language is every bit as hard as becoming an accomplished piano player, say.
We don’t view learning your native language as a “talent” because there’s no scarcity of people who can do that, but I think if we’re looking at this in some sort of big picture “how many people are talented?” way, I think we all are.
And secondly, even allowing the scarcity requirement, if you could list out all possible mental tasks there would be many that a given person’s brain configuration would be optimal for, as everyone’s brain is different.
When I say “mental task” I don’t mean that in an academic sense: maybe you are the best at finding an edge between two surfaces of very similar hue that are moving, say. And in a different world that would be a very lucrative skill.
Of course, you might say all this is besides the point: None of it means a given person will find they have a natural ability for something that is scarce and useful in this world.
And I’d agree: it’s demonstrably the case that many do not.
This has been my philosophy for a long time. Excluding people with unfortunate mental issues, I think people generally have at least one thing they are amazingly good at.
But “talent” has to be a broad term. The ability to diagnose and fix weird car problems in a snap is a talent to me. So is making all sorts of things. E.g., making a nice looking table. Glancing around your surroundings in the tullies and knowing where to find food and water.
Once you realize they nearly all of us are really good at something, it makes it harder to look down at people. After all, they can easily do something you have no clue how to do.
There is no contradiction between “there is such a thing as natural ability” and “you develop your abilities”.
I can work on my aim - that’s development. But I need a lot more work than someone who isn’t farsighted, doesn’t have astigmatism, and has better coordination than a featherless chicken.
Conversely, people can learn to plan. But there are things about planning which to me are instinctive, and which most other people have problems following even after decades of being professional planners.
To me, some have talent without working on it, it is a natural ability. Whereas for others they can achieve talent in something by working on it.
And, without doing a rigorous testing and analysis, I would say that everyone has SOME talent of some kind. It may not be related to public performance or creative achievement - heck, they may have a talent for eating hot peppers, or attracting bees, or cracking their knuckles, etc.
I don’t think everyone has something they’re destined to be crazy good at from birth, but believe that’s the case with many people.
Across the board, the Average Joe can with diligence learn to be a competent artist, cook, accountant, or carpenter, but a fraction of the population clearly excels at these skills with comparatively little apparent effort on their part, while others plod along.
Is there any way to tell if someone has some hidden aptitude, though, without actually trying it? My guess is most hidden aptitudes…stay hidden.
Imagine if your talent was computer programming but you were born in 1280AD Mongolia.
Maybe my talent is for something that is yet to exist, like time travel management. Or even used to exist long ago, like roof thatching.
Talent is one thing, developing skills is quite another.
There are always going to be folks whose natural abilities make it easier for them to do any given thing, but I also believe that most people are not lucky enough to find the opportunity to discover or cultivate their talent.
Talent is ghastly overrated. We all have many talents, but they have to be developed.
I have a great talent for fashion but zero interest in it. I would love to sing and dance on stage, but it ain’t going to happen.
To be a good, really good, computer programmer and not just a program monkey, you need to be a good analyst. In the Mongolian empire and a couple generations post-Genghis, you might have done quite well if you exploited those analytical abilities.
There was some reporting recently on the relationship between talent and practice. When you look at someone who’s really good at something, we typically think of them as having some sort of special talent for that thing, and probably they also practiced it a lot. But it could just but that their real aptitude was being able to convert practice into skill. That is to say, if two people are equally terrible at something and they both do that something 10,000 times, one of them will be better at the end because their brain reacted differently to that practice. And it could be that they could have picked anything and done it 10,000 times because their brain was just predisposed to improvement.
To make it even more complicated, having the stamina to do something 10,000 times without getting frustrated or bored or burnt-out is also a kind of talent, one I’m now struggling with as a parent. I’ve got a kid who wants to get better at soccer, but going out and getting whooped on every game is a good way to sap your motivation. I think environment plays a key role here, and we don’t usually think about environment as a factor of talent.
I have many talents that I extracted as tribute from the greek cities of Asia Minor…
I found out what my special purpose is for!
I think its pretty clear that some people are born with innate talents. But there is a huge spectrum and spread to these things and I think most people if not good at something can at least become minimally competent at something if they practice and apply themselves. I also agree about the interest aspect, I might be a great dancer but I’ll never know because its not something I care about. Musical talent interests me a lot and there is a spectrum within music as well. For instance there are people who are musical prodigies that can reproduce music flawlessly but they may not be able to write great, original music. Then there are people who are great song-writers but they may not have the chops to perform live, spontaneous, improvisational music.
I started playing the bass guitar in high school and I just “got it” right away, I was already better within a year of playing than friends of mine that had been playing several years, and this was according to them, I’m not trying to brag. I love playing and that helped too because I would literally practice 8 hours or more a day at times and this only fueled my natural talent and I would daresay that I am if not a virtuoso pretty dang close to it and I’m also great at writing original bass lines. I don’t just play with the two fingers I incorporate the double thumb technique, slapping, harmonics, two-hand tapping. I know I have other talents but that’s the talent I have honed and developed the most.
I have always had a large vocabulary, good-spelling and performed well on critical reading and verbal tests. On the other hand I suck at math, I don’t know why its like that part of my brain is just broken, I just don’t get math, but when I study and apply myself I can get ok grades and I’ve always been able to pass math-based courses. But I’m not “good” at math and I will never be, I was the kid that always had to study really hard and just do problems over and over again, till it was really more like memorization and a slight change in a problem would confound me, people that are naturally good at math just seem to get it, you show them a couple problems and they have it locked in, I’m not like that at all.
I firmly believe that a sizeable percentage of folk (WAG - maybe 10-25%?) are extremely average across the board. Would you say they are talented at being average?
Some smaller percentage of folk are below average in many/most areas. Not intellectually disabled, just below average. No diagnosable personality disorder or other mental/emotional pathology, but not particularly curious, empathetic, motivated, etc. Not obese, but not above average fitness. Same for every other aspect of physical/mental/personality… Even if only 1% of the population - that’s a lot of people.
Some talent is inherent, other is developed. With only rare exceptions, iMO the exceptionally talented have both innate ability and the drive to maximize that ability.
**Malcolm Gladwell **has made a mint with his book, Outliers. It really should be simply called “Nurture” because that is all it observed: that environmental factors have a huge impact on who is successful.
He uses case study examples to make a basic point: everywhere, in every generation, huge “crops” of humans are born with a variety of talents. But only when forces converge to create situations and opportunities for that talent to be cultivated and put to use are “perfect storms” created.
Are people born with talents like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs all the time? Gladwell would argue "absolutely - but being born on the west coast of the U.S. around 1955 when tech innovation was happening in a cultural area that cultivated entrepreneurship was the perfect storm that they rode to the top.
Talent is both under- and over-appreciated.
There are people who have savant-like powers who we hold up as type specimens of “true genius”. But these people are few and far between.
I wouldn’t go so far as saying that we all have something we’re “amazingly” good at. Maybe we all possess the potential for being “amazingly” good at something. But I don’t think there’s evidence that we possess a “gift”, right out of the box. Being able to cultivate one’s abilities requires a lot of things coming together. This often doesn’t happen.
“Amazingly good” is also relative. A person can be good at what they do compared to all the people in their social circle or in their insular community. But in a broader context, maybe they are just slightly above average. Maybe they wouldn’t even be considered “talented”. At the end of the day, for most things, being above average is all you need to impress the folks around you. So if we define “talent” from this low bar, sure, maybe all of us are talented in something. But I think most people have a loftier definition of “talent”–like greater than 2 standard deviations of the mean.