Talents, Skill Development and the End of Excuses

Talent is cheaper than table salt. What separates the talented individual from the successful one is a lot of hard work. – Stephen King

Talent is an innate ability that an individual possesses with or without their conscious knowledge. A talented person hasn’t taken any conscious action to develop a particular talent, yet his/her ability is superior to the level of the average person.

We often hear that everyone has a special talent, but I don’t think that is true. And actually, I believe this idea does more harm than good.

The reason why I don’t believe everybody born with a special talent is because I don’t think I have any special talent. I spent much of my childhood and part of my adulthood trying to figure out what my talent was. It may be possible that I was the only person on the planet without a natural talent? This was not fair!

But later I understood that even when there are people who born with a particular talent, this is an exception and not a rule.

Skills

Skills, on the other hand, are abilities that an individual acquires through conscious action. You have to work (often hard and smart) to develop a proficient level in a given skill. And skill development has one main rule: The harder you work, the better you become. I believe that working smart is also an important ingredient of skill development or the mastery of any endeavor.

This is not a surprise to anyone, yet many people decide to ignore this path and prefer to invest their time trying to figure out “their” talent. Because is easy.

Talent is not Enough

The funny thing about talent, is that amazing as it is, it is not enough to achieve greatness in a given field. Beethoven was an amazingly talented man, but he was not just talented, he was also a hard worker.

Talent is a good head-start, but serves of nothing if after the head-start you stand still waiting for another push. Skills and the hard (and smart) work needed to develop them, might be a slower path, but is far more rewarding in the long run.

With proper training and working not only hard, but smart you can become far more proficient in any subject or field than the most talented person on that subject or field.

Grit Beats Talent Any Day

Woody Allen famously declared that “Eighty percent of success is showing up”. All the talent in the world will do nothing for you if you sit and wait for greatness to happen.

Stop searching for talent, stop wondering what your innate ability is; you are not an X-Men!

Instead, invest in skill development and become better every day in whatever you have chosen to do. Study, learn and act towards your goals and dreams despite the fact that you don’t know what your talent is. You might not have one anyway, but it doesn’t matter; most of us don’t have any either.

But we have grit, and are willing to work hard for the things that matter the most to us, and this is far more valuable than any talent.