Talent and Other Fairytales

Posted on by Sarah A. Hoyt

I’m so tired – so awfully, comprehensively tired – of people telling me that they would like to do this or that, but they “don’t have the talent.”

You know, I think the fault of this is of the stories we tell ourselves, right?  In movies, in stories, in all sorts of stories we tell, there is some sort of magical gift people have.

I mean, you know, Dumbo can fly, and the hidden prince can king it from the moment that he kills the villain or climbs on the throne or whatever.  And that fricken prince can pull the sword out of the stone, and every movie and book – every single one, plus five – that deals with the creative professions, it all hinges on the myth of talent.

Supposedly you’re born knowing how to do whatever you’re supposed to do, or at least being really, really good at it the first time you try it.  And then all you need is to be discovered.

If only!  Oh, if ONLY!

I’ve gotten to the point that whenever a novelist-actor-dancer-composer is discovered in a movie, and he asks something like “do I have any talent, doc?  Can I make it?”  And the other guy says the equivalent of “you got the goods.  You’re amazing,” I want to reach in, through the screen, grab both their heads and bonk them together until they stop.

The other part contributing to this, of course, is that creative work of any kind is often internal or weird.  I mean, you don’t see us, as you see sports stars – who, now I think about it also suffer from the myth of talent – bat the same ball over and over, slowly correcting our standing and our aim, until we get it.  No, you see us sitting in front of the computer, typing, and you don’t know that before we sat down to finish that story, we spent three days – while scrubbing toilets, ironing, doing the cat boxes and even reading – trying to figure out how to avoid that huge mess we know we made in our last novel, that THING that other people don’t see, but we know kept it merely good and not great.

And then when we manage it, it looks effortless and you go, “Oh, wow.  You’re just doing this stuff effortlessly.”

How I wish.  Some days it feels like I’m typing with what remains of my strength and pulling vivid scenes out of an energy I don’t have.

The other part, other than the stories we tell ourselves, is that I think people look – from outside – like they’re just like.  As Heinlein put it, “Luck is that with which the mediocre explain the work of genius.”  I’m not sure I believe in genius, either, but it’s definitely the way to explain away the often insane work that went into a “lucky” strike.

Back in 2003 when Dan had lost his job (as many did in the tech bust) and I was unemployed following the crash of the Shakespeare fantasies, we went to dinner with an old friend.  Dan used to work for him.  He knows us pretty well, and even back then had known us for more than ten years.

We were talking to him about how worried we were, with a mortgage, two young kids, and no prospects of a job on the horizon, since the entire field was in crisis, and he said “Oh, I don’t worry about you.  I worry about so and so and so and so, and myself even, before I worry about you.  You two are talented and lucky.  You’ll fall on your feet.”

Are we lucky?  I don’t know.  I know over the next year I wrote seventeen proposals and enough short stories to make five thousand dollars in short stories (at an average of three hundred a story.)

Are we talented?  I don’t think so.

Look, I’ll admit I had a certain verbal facility in Portuguese.  I’m told I could talk in sentences before I could walk.  Granted this would be far more impressive if I could walk before two and a half.  (I was really good at crawling.  My theory is that my issue was ear infections.  I still suffer from them as if I were a toddler.) I could read by the time I entered elementary.  I loved those days when the teacher said “Today we’re going to write an essay.” And I was writing my own “novels” (around 15k words) in the infamous pink notebooks, a chapter at a time during class, and passing them around my form for reading at break.  (You’re part of a form, you stay in a classroom, the teachers come to you.)

Part of this, though, might have very little to do with talent, and more to do with the fact that dad read all the time, and my brother read all the time, and my (girl) cousin read all the time.  Reading all the time was expected, so I did it, and then it seemed logical to try to write, right?  And I knew a little about it from having read so much (not a lot.  Those stories sucked.  Think lowest of fanfic, even though it wasn’t.  Well, unless it was Heinlein fanfic.  Um… now I think about it, maybe I haven’t grown all that much.)

The one gift I had was the least useful to the professional story teller.  I had a massive and varied vocabulary – but that might not be so much an inborn thing, as the fact that the entire family talked like that.

But then I came to the states.  You know the instinctive feeling you have for allusion, connotation and denotation?  Gone.  I was good at English, mind.  I spoke grammatical, correct English.  What I couldn’t was “feel” the language.  The first three years I kept telling Dan I was “blind”.   I.e. I didn’t know what words would evoke what feeling.

But I still wanted to be a writer.  So I had to immerse myself in American English, in its permutations and regional variations.  I read a lot, and I read everything, including but not limited to craft magazines, true confessions and tabloids.  I also listened to a lot of television.  Listened?  Well, I’m not visual.  And mostly I had the TV on for company while I cleaned house or whatever.  (I came from a loud and boisterous family.  Our little two-bedroom apartment in a complex that was empty during the day save for me and a couple of moms with kids, might as well have been on the dark side of the moon.  It felt lonely.  So I kept the TV on.  Mostly Disney because it was less likely to have snarls or explosions which would startle me while I was cooking dinner.  My inlaws still think I should write for children because they assumed I was really interested in children programing [rolls eyes.])

During those first five years or so, it wasn’t so much what I wrote (I think a novel and a short story) it was the preparation I made.  First, it was the reading, and the talking – with my husband, with friends – and a lot of listening.

The other part of it was my teaching myself touch typing and improving my speed so that I didn’t have time to think of every word I wrote, as I pursued story.

Talent?

I don’t think.  I still have those first stories somewhere.  Remember I was in my twenties.  They would read okay for a ten year old.

And I got rejections.  And I kept trying.  For years.  For many years, I was the writer of no future.  I topped 100 rejections by March every year.

And then things changed.  I placed second in a regional contest.  Mind you, that piece was grossly flawed, but placing second was an incentive to keep going.

And then came another win and… eventually my first acceptance, in 92, 8 years after I’d started trying to write seriously.  And then three more acceptances for that story before it saw the light of day (it killed magazines and publishers.)  I could sell nothing else, though.  That story was the only one that was a fully functional story and it took me another three years before I wrote another one, and could reproduce the effect at least half the time.

And then I sold a novel.  And another—

And sometimes I feel that I’m only now starting to have a glimpse into making my novels work.  Which is why I fight so much with them.

My husband and kids, who know me and my writing better than anyone else, agree with me.  They say I’m maybe halfway to wherever I’m going – if that far.

Climbing hand over hand.  On raw and bloody fingertips.

I was talking to a friend the other day and I said I must be the world’s least talented writer.  Given my education and the advantages offered me, after 28 years or so of practicing my craft I’m only now starting to get a glimpse of what I can do with it.

I’m either completely untalented or utterly stupid.  And yet – no, I’m not fishing for compliments.  It is what it is – I can write decently.  And I have made a career of it, even with my apprentice pieces.

So, clearly, it’s not talent that’s needed.

And I have to say everyone else I know who has made it in an artistic field might have talent – how in heck do you judge someone else’s natural gift without being them? – but even if they do, it’s not half as important as wanting to succeed and as sheer, raw, blunt stubbornness.

Years ago when hearing Connie Willis speak she said that in the dark of night, in the solitude of our own hearts, we know exactly how good or bad we are.

Maybe.  Right then, in the dark of night, in the solitude of my own heart, I knew I was an untalented hack.  But I determined to learn through raw effort what perhaps came easier to other people.  Because if it could be learned, I could do it.  And craft will substitute for talent any time and twice on Sunday – with the advantage that it’s controllable.  You can call craft to you at will, once you have learned it.

Is there talent?  For anyone?

I don’t know.  There are people that seem obviously, blindingly talented to me right off the gate.  I’ve mentored people who turn in a first book that makes me green with envy at their “talent.”  But is it?  Almost every one of these people have read for most of their lives and are smart and have a feeling for both language and people.

And there are people like my kids.  Inherited talent?  Or growing up in a household where we’d pause movies to discuss plots?  Is it like my “talent” for verbal expression in Portuguese simply the result of being immersed in this house?

I don’t know.  And I don’t care.  Maybe I even have “talent” whatever it is.  Maybe it’s a spark buried deep in you that only comes to life with work, craft and desire to get better.  In which case, how would you know it was there?

What I know is that it doesn’t matter.  If there’s something you want to do, you can do it (We’re assuming you’re not crazy enough to want to be an Olympic runner when you were born with no legs – though even there, there are workarounds these days.)  If you want it hard enough.  If you’re willing to work for it.  If you are too stupid to take no for an answer, and smart enough to know what you don’t know and to correct what you’re doing wrong.

Talent?

Maybe.  But never mind that.  Here, on the cliff face, climbing by the force of my torn fingernails, it’s the effort and the wanting that count for more.

 

202 thoughts on “Talent and Other Fairytales”

  1. I do feel that people have different natural aptitudes. There are different types of intelligence, and some things come easier than others.

    However, having an aptitude does not automatically convey the skill. It does make the skill easier to acquire, but there isn’t any substitute for actual hands on practice.

    I have a natural aptitude for mechanics. Relationships between moving parts are easy for me to visualize–I can “see” how things are suppose to work and can usually figure out pretty quickly why something isn’t working the way it should.

    That alone, however, doesn’t make me a good mechanic. It has taken years of trial and error and practice to gain the level of skill to know the best way to change the way the parts of a machine interact to turn it from non-working to working. Aptitude helps me to see the problem, skill is what I use to fix it.

    In the same way having a natural aptitude for language does not automatically make one a good writer. It helps you identify the problems and gives you a feel for how something could be better, but the actually putting words down to make a story requires skill, and skill is only gained through time and effort.

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    1. Actually language is the least valuable of the writers’ inclinations. In fact, a passion for words might make your writing too opaque. Trust me on this. I should do something for MGC identifying “writer talents” and which are most valuable.

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      2. I always shudder when an Elementary teacher talks about ‘writing creatively’. Outside of SF&F I haven’t read many authors who were teachers of any kind.
        It isn’t just having the mechanics down. It’s having a particular flair for something. And with that flair you can take a set of words, change this and that one to a synonym, rearrange the placing, omit certain punctuation marks for another choice – and then you have a sentence that people enjoy reading. Rather than one that just conveys information in a boring way.
        Maybe there is talent. If so, there are a lot of talented people who will never be published.

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      3. In fact, a passion for words might make your writing too opaque.

        Case in point: James Joyce had a passion for words.

        Or take another case. Back when Sarah posted about an article by a non-fiction writer* claiming that (among other things) fiction writers didn’t need to do nearly as much research as she did, one of the (male) regulars from that non-fiction writer’s blog invaded Sarah’s blog to white-knight her (and was extremely rude to just about everyone here). I remember particularly that he claimed that he’d written a science fiction story where he did things right (in his opinion), among which was that he “played with language”. I might have considered seeking out his story and reading it out of curiosity until that point. That phrase made me worry that I’d find something on the order of Joyce, only less readable. Or perhaps on the order of The Eye of Argon, though its author had the excuse of being only 16 when he wrote that.

        Actually, that’s a good third example: The Eye of Argon. Which demonstrates that sometimes “a passion for words” means owning a theisauras.

        * Whose name I’m forgetting, though I probably wouldn’t mention it even if I remembered it, lest her rude defender find it via Google and come back to taunt us a second time. Though to give her credit, she was quite polite about things most of the time. It was Mr. White Knight who insulted everyone — and worse, didn’t even seem to realize he’d done it.

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      4. That’s a comforting thought since I don’t have much talent for using words. Beautiful or poetic use of language can even get in the way of the story when I’m reading something, I prefer stories written in a simple language (and that goes for both English and Finnish). I don’t get poetry, much, and I’m afraid I prefer somebody like ERB to Shakespeare partly because the latter wrote everything in damn verse and when I read it I have problems getting past that well enough to see the story (sorry, I know that’s kind of sacrilegious).

        I’m mostly visual, I think in images a lot more than in words. Who knows, I might make a better movie director than writer, only that’s a lot more difficult field to try to get into, you need money or degree or loads of friends and strangers willing to work for free or even willing to donate money before you can create much of anything so I guess I’ll just try to keep on working trying to learn writing. I do want to tell stories. :)

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      5. Oh, yeah. John Gardner observes in The Art of Fiction that writers too sensitive to language have to learn to draw it back so as to concentrate on such brute essentials as plot and character. (Probably saw a good number, being a teacher of creative writing.)

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      6. I’d be really interested in reading such an article. :) I think you have a unique viewpoint, having learned to write in more than one language. It seems to me that would let you see what are actually writer’s tools besides the language.

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    2. Indeed. I tend to learn certain things very quickly if they are electromechanical, but despite untold hours of practice I have never been able to play the guitar.
      True, I could practice until it became an obsession and maybe get somewhere, but when I gauge myself against my cousin, who picked up a guitar and could do amazing things with it by the end of the day, I’m just not all that interested. He can’t even change his oil. If that isn’t talent or natural aptitude I don’t know what you’d call it.

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    1. Will is good. Will is necessary. But it’s not what I’ve always called “talent”, which could be better defined as “the intrinsic upper limit to how good you can get at doing X” – it tells nothing about where you are, and nothing about the effort that will be/was required to get to your limit. Without will to become good, you stop improving far short of your talent. With all the will in the world, including the willingness to ruin your health for your passion, you can still only get as good as your talent will let you.

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  3. We all have strong and weak areas. But even the strong require _work_ to actually get good at.

    However . . . failing to resist . . .

    Sarah, you have _such_ a _Gift_!!!!

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    2. Who was it that estimated it takes 10,000 hours of work to master anything? And was it Bernstein who said it takes “practice, practice, practice” to get to Carnegie Hall? And then there was the inspiration vs. perspiration quip from Edison, was it? Gah, need hot drinks …

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  6. There are aptitudes that some are seemingly born with, but without work they aren’t very useful.

    On my mother’s side, I come from a family of musicians, in a sense. Grandfather was both a professional musician *and* a professional artist, self-taught in both. Uncle plays and sings regionally, gets paid pretty good for it, too, and so on. Mom’s at least as good as her father, as a sketch artist, yet she only does it in play and not for profit.

    If there’s heritable talent there, I didn’t get it. *chuckle* I spent about fifteen years a musician, learning every day, and spent hundreds of thousands of hours, if not a million or more, at the keyboard, on the horn, singing, performing, etc. Several of my students learned much more quickly than others, even me, to my chagrin. To this day I have white guy rhythm, and need hours and hours to internalize the sequence if I’m going to perform in a group (which I’ve not done in years).

    The thing is, those students and folks I worked with who excelled early on seemed to peak early. Most of them got to a certain point and never did progress any further. They were “good enough.” Probably the worst one, at least at first, was more like me (but harder working- I slacked). Her early attempts were ear-bleedingly bad. Last I heard, she’s angling for first chair in one of the larger state orchestras. I’d attribute that success largely to hard work and persistence, myself. *grin*

    “Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent. The slogan “press on” has solved and always will solve the problems of the human race.” Coolidge had the right idea.

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      1. Makes sense. Ten percent ain’t much, heck, anybody can give that ten percent. Persistence, that’s nothing more than saying “just a little more” until it’s done.

        Put that way, one can get a lot done. Smart man, your father. *grin*

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      1. Edison, via the Harper’s Monthly Magazine, 1932 (attrib. 1902). Probably the most succinct phrasing of the idea.

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    3. ‘Good enough’ is very, very bad when you can get there easily. You’ll keep thinking getting past it should be equally easy, and then when it isn’t the temptation to just stick with ‘good enough’ is so damn big…

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      1. You’re right. Maybe it’s a part of our natures to coast when things are easy. Lord knows I don’t do a tenth piece of what I could if I really applied myself.

        It takes a certain self discipline to push yourself when things get easy. It really doesn’t come naturally for most of us.

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    4. Freddy Adu. He was so talented so early that he went professional at age 14. And then what? He peaked too early, it seems, and never got any better. What a disappointment for us American soccer fans.

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      1. New name on me. I stopped following soccer when my friend Marc died back in ’98.

        Marc was a first generation Brazilian American, and simply amazing on the field. Almost prescient. Like Adu, he was schooling much larger and more experienced players early on.

        I met him in high school, when I almost got suspended for fighting the last time. He was by this time a bigger guy, and had been running his mouth a bit, and younger me tended to take exception to that…

        I dented some lockers with his head. Later, I claimed he kicked my butt to anyone who asked, because I really wasn’t supposed to be fighting in school at that point.

        Great guy, Marc. Turned out to be a good friend and true to his word, later. Drunk driver plowed into him one early Saturday morning in the fall and he died on the operating table a bit later that day. I still miss that guy.

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  7. Heh. I’m a terrible pilot; I know Alaskan pilots who are so skilled that it takes a level of skill just to understand how much more skilled they are. And when I talked to Paul Claus, who can do things that require a level of knowledge, judgement, and precision almost inhuman – and make it look effortless – he shrugged and mumbled, “Lots of practice. Just keep practicin’, is all.”

    Because I choose to put other things first, and don’t fly enough, I will never be a great pilot. Serviceable, competent, graceless, safe… but not great, and I know it.

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  8. I have a natural aptitude for words and music. Doesn’t mean I am good at writing or singing. I have written poetry since I was nine years old. I was published in a literary mag in my forties. It took that long for me to realize that I needed to study poetry and forms before trying to get my poetry published even though I can be good with rhymes.

    I can sing on tune. I have a large range just under some of the proclaimed divas in the music world today. But instead of putting me in voice when I was ready to learn, my parents put me in piano. I am a decent hack on the piano because I can read music. But there is a ceiling to what I can do because my hands have weak pinkies and I can’t stretch my hands. My one chance failed (no I was never anywhere I could get voice lessons after that one chance–I was in the Navy–or there were money problems).

    So I am trying to say (please forgive this long comment) that I believe in natural aptitude (as in talents), but unless the talents are improved with work and skills, then they are the seeds that haven’t been planted.

    Plus even though I have a talent for words, stories are the hardest genre that I have ever written. There is a LOT of moving parts. ;-) Very unlike essays, academic essays, or memoirs.

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  9. Sarah, Sarah, Sarah… “…dark side of the moon…” Are you trying to rile me up this morning? ‘Cuz trust me, I’m riled enough already.

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    3. Eh, if I lived on the lunar farside, I’d tell people it was the dark side of the Moon. Because it sounds cooler, that’s why.

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  10. I knew a Russian emigrant who had perfectly grammatical English online, and so one day I looked at what she had posted, and counter-posted that I didn’t want any bridges today, thank you.

    Causing a long thread explaining the idiom.

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    1. Idioms are bit of a problem for me when it comes to using them, partly because some of them are the same both in Finnish and English, some are almost same, just a bit differently expressed, and then there are the different ones, and half of the time I don’t remember which idioms are in which category. I guess it relates to that ‘thinks in images’ thing, I often tend to kind of see them – sort of as if you remembered a mini movie you once saw while knowing what the images were supposed to symbolize, if that makes any sense – rather than hear or see the words when I think of them (and then add the ones which I have misunderstood, either language).

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        2. And hey, if you ever meet some nice unmarried older man who paints cars for a living (and preferably likes fantasy and sf at least some, is a Heinlein fan and knows how to shoot – other stuff optional) and could perhaps use a partner who could paint pictures on cars (once taught how to use the tools, I have never held an airbrush) you could always give him my contact information. ;)

          Well, I don’t know how popular those are nowadays, but doing something like painting (not necessarily good) copies of Frank Frazetta’s works, or images of Vampirella or some other skimpily clad comics character or whatever images perhaps are popular now, on the side of vans or truck trailers might actually be something I’d enjoy doing.

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              1. Oh, cr*p (I suspected that, I did say he should know guns, didn’t I? :D ). Wall murals? Or any kind of decorative painting?

                I do like those silly 80’s heavy metal album cover style pictures, they amuse me, and it might be fun to paint something like that, but yep, here too the guys who still might want something like than on a car, or phone, or anything, tend to be ones most people would cross the street to avoid.

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                1. I do like those silly 80′s heavy metal album cover style pictures

                  On a vaguely related tangent: are you familiar with Metalocalypse?

                  Took me a while to get into it, but it’s quite an amusing send-up of the whole Death Metal phenomenon:-).

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                  1. Hm. Sounds like something worth a look, even though I not particularly familiar with Death Metal. I used to listen, well, still do, sometimes, to some of the late 70’s and early 80’s bands, Iron Maiden and so on, but quit actively trying to follow anything around mid- to late 80’s.

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                3. I was partially teasing Sarah. The big heyday of painting on cars was awhile back, the large van being the most notorious. However, there is still a narrow segment that does still decorate cars – mostly certain ethnic groups, or narrow car club culture like low-rider clubs. Also there is still a niche market for decoration of custom motorcycles – again with some hints of counter-culture (although the whole biker thing mixes two distinct groups – one the lower class criminal element and the second the upper middle class who are accountants and bankers during the week and bikers on weekends).

                  So your idea is not at all silly, just not entirely mainstream.

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                  1. At least in my area, there’s a growing use of “skins” – computer-generated art, printed on really wide plastic, and installed to completely or mostly cover a vehicle. Mostly commercial but some fairly wild personal vehicles, too. If your artistic skills and enjoyment transfer well from brush to computer, there’s a bit of a market for such.

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          2. For some reason, Russians love pictures on cars. I’ve seen tons of pictures of Russian car and truck art, but I think a lot of them are done with those picture-plastic wrap that they use for ads on buses, and not with real paint.

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          1. Wait, those were supposed to be photos of RES? The page I saw said you got cheesecake photos taken by RES, your choice of turtle, cherry, double mousse, or plain cheesecake. Hmmm . . .

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          3. Shucks, everybody loves wallabies. We’re ranked just behind cats and seal pups. Wayyyyy ahead of undead vampire kitties.

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              1. Sorry – family secret. They are so tender you can cook them almost anyway you like; the trick is to give them flavour and I’m under a strict intergenerational geas oath to keep the spice bag and sauce mixes confidential. The only way I could tell you would be to marry you, and that would be bigamy.

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                3. Really? From those I have known who have ate seal, the problem was not GIVING them flavor, that they had in plenty, it was MASKING the flavor that was the trick.

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                  1. Ooooooh, yeah. Now, granted, fresh seal is much better than seal oil, but seal oil is definitely an acquired taste, and slightly rancid seal oil smell will linger for days in an airport terminal after it soaks into the granite…

                    Hand me a drink and ask me sometime about the TSA agents and Native Alaskan foods, if you ever meet me. I have stories…

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                  1. Well, yeah, there’s a Continental Divide and at least one entire county in between, IIRC from the last time I went through that neck of the woods. After driving from Ohio to Colorado, anyplace IN Colorado seemed pretty close.

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      2. I once went through an afternoon trying to explain the whole, “bricks without straw” thing to some Mexican co-workers. I was trying to get a translation or a similar idiom. The best I could get was “don’t look for apples from an elm tree”.

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        1. ….how does “bricks without straw” take any explaining beyond “mud bricks need straw or they fall apart”?

          Maybe “cookies without flour”?

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          1. That couldn’t be any worse than the person who confused the salt and sugar proportions. It might even be better because it would have more obvious warning signs.

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        2. Hehe, funny– I didn’t even know it related to Exodus, I just know it from so many examples around today!

          “Make XYZ product without XYZ!”

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          2. I figured it was a “Catholics don’t read the bible like Protestants do” thing so today at work I asked one of my hispanic co-workers who is a JW about “bricks without straw” and he knew the bible story better than me but it had no more meaning to him than me saying “walking without lacing your shoes”. Metaphors are kinda’-like macros for content, you have to have a shared basis to understand them.
            (I have to figure also that the hispanics I work with also never thought about making bricks, and never thought about how it is done.)

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            1. For some reason I always associated mud bricks with straw, with Hispanics. I realize it comes from the bible, but in my mind I always see a bunch of Mexicans making bricks whenever the saying is brought up.

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              1. Honestly, I don’t know. Most of my Spanish speaking co-workers are office workers, and if their parents were laborers, they were migrant farm workers, or if in construction they were framers and roofers. So there is something of a sampling bias.

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                2. It may have to do with what part of the Hispanic world people came from. Adobe doesn’t work in southern Mexico, the Yucatan, or Guatamala, say, pretty much anywhere that rain is common. I associate adobe with New Mexico, little bits of Arizona and Colorado, and parts of northern Mexico. And that one weird house by that county road in western KS . . . which was probably what I call faux-dobe (see Santa Fe, NM), anyway.

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                    1. Point. My budget usually stops me at Santa Fe (state archive, state engineer, Fra Angelico Chavez Library) so I hadn’t seen those.

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  11. Talent versus effort: This one has been debated since forever. I think it’s a variant of predestination versus free will. And so it’s tough to beat Herman Melville on it.

    On the one hand, I recall briefly dating a theater major in my college days. She was reasonably attractive and could sing like an angel, but she claimed no aptitude whatsoever for math or science, a claim well supported by her transcript (to the extend I knew it; I had previously T.A.’d a class she was in.) I pulled a bit of an experiment on her. Don’t ask me how the subject came up, but I explained the basics of derivative calculus to her without telling her it was calculus. I then asked her to explain it back. She could (with some expression of puzzlement over why our conversation had taken this particular direction.) I told her it was derivative calculus I had just taught her, and she could no longer explain it back. That’s gotta be a psychological barrier, as well as an illustration that maybe we overrate talent with difficult subjects, and underrate competent instruction.

    On the other hand, when I was singing with the Caltech Mens Glee Club and was about to complete my Ph.D., I mentioned to the choir direcor my desire to take voice lessons, to see if I could develop something of the singing ability of a mutual friend who had encouraged me in my musical interest. Without batting an eye, the choir director said, “Not a chance. Dean has a gift that you and I don’t.” Harsh? But I’ve since concluded he was right.

    I faced this with my son, the one who now is all but crippled with chronic fatigue syndrome. Before getting sick, he was an avid chess player, and fairly good, something like 1520 rated at age 15. But he expressed ambitions to make a living as a chess grandmaster, and I had to point out that, while being rated 1520 at age 15 was impressive, many sigma above the mean, it was far short of making him the kind of chess prodigy who might actually make a living playing chess. (I’m afraid this is one of the reasons he’s not speaking to me any more.) Oh, and one of the most telling indications of how bad the CFS is is that he can’t play chess work a durn any more. Can’t focus like he used to.

    And yet … I think a lot of us do overrate talent versus hard work in the U.S. It certainly makes a good excuse for failing to prosper when the real problem is failing to work hard and put off some immediate gratifications.

    But on the gripping hand, I see more and more populist sentiment at right-leaning Internet forums of the kind that denigrates expertise and talent. Then again, perhaps what really bugs me is the deprecation of the hard work required to become really expert at something. This was particularly brought home to me when I had just finished reading Edward Conard’s excellent Unintended Consequence, which left me marveling at his grasp of our very complex financial system, and then ran into a fellow on an Internet forum who was not only possessed of a grossly oversimplified understanding of the finance system, but was pround to be possessed of a grossly oversimplified understanding of the finance system. Apparently all that complexity was just smoke and mirrors by people out to make the simple complex so they could shaft us all. Not that there isn’t plenty of shafting and gaming of the system, but come on.

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    1. “a Gift for it” – bothersome word. Not sure I can define it other than as some combination of aptitude (how easy is learning the skill) and talent (how good could I ultimately get, if willing to do whatever work is needed).

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  12. “Talent”

    Talent, I think, does exist in the world. There are some of us out there that, even with practice, could never do what a Michael Jordan did, if only because we don’t have the height. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not trying to hate. The man’s workout routine is well documented. He took three hundred free throws a day to work on his skill – during the offseason. Hard work is what took him from being a guy who would win a game at the park most days to winning six NBA Championships. I _still_ don’t believe I could be the basketball player that he was because I don’t have the physical gifts. Now, could I be a _much better_ basketball player than I am now if I did a tenth of what he did practice-wise? Yes. Maybe in the NBA? Weeeel…I’m 5’8″. Good enough to play at the high school level if I had worked at it though? Yes. And, let’s face it, I never wanted to play in the NBA anyway. That’s why I never put in the work.

    What irritates me about “talent” is that so many people use it as an excuse. I think of myself as being a half-way decent writer. I’m not exactly the next Tolkein, and I’ll probably never sell as many books as JK Rowling, but I can at least put a decent sentence together most of the time. And at one point, I had written something that, aside from the title (What’s a good way to come up with a title BTW?) was not at all terrible. I mean, I’m not awarding myself a Hugo here, but I was pretty proud of it.

    So I sent the first few chapters of it to a friend of mine named Karl. He’s a good guy with an English degree who likes fantasy books and had borrowed some of my favorites and loved them. I asked him to just kinda check them out and tell me what he thought. Basically, I thought of him like an Alpha Reader, except I hadn’t heard the term at the time. He took it and read it. He even like it and, over the course of four chapters, came up with a favorite character in the book. He liked my mage because he was a bit of a rebel and the way my magic worked in the book. I was pretty happy. Here was a guy who had read some of the best in fantasy literature (at least as far as my tastes go) and was comparing my work to theirs favorably. But then he got weird on me.

    His next comment was “At least one of us got some talent.” It turns out that he had gotten an English degree with the intention of becoming a writer. I was pretty impressed with this. I write all the time, but I’m a little leary of making my living that way. Granted, I hate the job I do and pretty much every time I picture my future it’s as a person who spends half of his waking hours writing and the other half reading, but DUDE… Job security?

    Then I asked him if he had ever been published. The answer was no. That’ll happen. Most writers haven’t been. Something about the look on his face told me why, but I thought I’d ask anyway. “Umm.. Karl? Have you ever WRITTEN anything?” His response? “No, but I don’t have your talent.”

    TALENT?!?!?!?!!?

    Umm…

    I’m pretty decent with the American language. I should be. Not only did I work my ass off in high school and before in English classes, not only have I read more books THIS WEEK than most people read in their ENTIRE LIVES but I have a freaking HISTORY DEGREE. Why does that matter? Because history majors _write_. Constantly. ANd a lot. My ex-wife had degrees in English and Journalism and used to freak out about how much I had to write for school. Oh yeah, and I’m always telling stories (sometimes verbally, sometimes in writing) and I spent years in and out of E-wrestling. (Basically you create a fictitious wrestler as your character and compete against other guys and their characters. The competition is judged, and the actual matches are written by the President of the fed (club). I was both a player and a fedhead at different times.) I used to write probably 9-10k words a WEEK providing others with free entertainment. I may not dominate the writing world the way Michael Jordan dominated the NBA, but dammit, I worked hard like he did. I’m good because I’ve earned it.

    As a corollary, I think he’s not as good for the obvious reason. He didn’t work at it. He got his degree and stopped writing. I mean, how in the BLUE HELL can anyone get published if they don’t write? Granted, writing a story is no guarantee of getting published but NOT writing is a guarantee of NOT getting published. Think about it. How can someone publish something that was never written? It irritates me.

    Basically, long story long, what I’m saying is that “talent” is not enough. It takes work to use that talent and too many people won’t work at things to improve them. I’m sick of hearing people use lack of “talent” as an excuse.

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    1. For some people, who took the wrong message from the people who told them to go to college, getting a formal education ought to be enough; there’s an emotional blockage against ALSO doing the work to create a facility. Their credentials actually get in the way of learning to do something well. Always sad to see.

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  13. Never destroy a dream.

    If you have imagination you can do anything. With practice you might actually do it well.

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  14. Those stories sucked. Think lowest of fanfic, even though it wasn’t. Well, unless it was Heinlein fanfic. Um… now I think about it, maybe I haven’t grown all that much.

    I can relate. I have some of my early writings sitting in my hard drive; looking back, they’re quite dreadful. However, everyone has to start somewhere.

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    1. But… do you ever look at an old story and think, “How did l ever come up with THAT?” And not in a bad way l, either. The most frustrating are the unfinished ones that are intriguing, but you can’t remember where you were going with it.

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  15. The idea that “talent” substitutes for hard work is an especially pernicious one in our society. One that popular media propagandizes constantly to great harm.

    That said, while I am good at getting projects finished, where I can’t do what you do is that I have no creativity. I can make an idea work, but I don’t come up with the idea.

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    1. Nearly as pernicious is the idea that talent does not need to be developed. Many kids identified as “Gifted & Talented” suffer from being allowed to cruise through lower grades, never learning how to study, never learning how to organize information, never learning how to pay attention in class, only to wash ashore in college without any of the skills required to compete.

      Back during the Clinton presidency his supporters bragged about how he had skated through college and law school, so brilliant he never had to attend class and barely needed to crack a book; he would simply borrow a classmate’s notes before the final and ace the exam. Few of his advocates showed any realization that the traits they described defined a shallow man, content to grasp a superficial understanding of a topic and lacking the knowledge of how to take those class notes himself.

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        1. Heh. I thought that way, for a long time. I have since decided that it gave me a heterodox set of study skills, and looked for the best way to apply them. Being a filter-feeding infovore has its’ place.

          Mew

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    2. I was so out of it when I wrote this that I forgot to mention the man in the White House who thinks he has “talent” at everything, so he doesn’t need to learn anything. That’s even worse than not trying due to alleged lack of talent.

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      1. Indeed more than talented. Didn’t he once say he was a better speechwriter than his speechwriters … and yet, when he’s off his teleprompter, he’s utterly incoherent … what?

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        1. eh, when you write out a speech, you have a chance to revise away. Spontaneous speaking is your first draft. Not logically inconsistent, those two things.

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          2. Wikipedia:

            “The Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which unskilled individuals suffer from illusory superiority, mistakenly rating their ability much higher than is accurate. This bias is attributed to a metacognitive inability of the unskilled to recognize their ineptitude.[1] Actual competence may weaken self-confidence, as competent individuals may falsely assume that others have an equivalent understanding.”

            For examples, see most politicians. Particularly the crew we’ve elected most recently at the Federal level.

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                1. IIRC, it was a post (somewhat) on that topic which first brought me to AtH. I believe it was on the four (?) levels of skill — first level you are so unskilled you don’t know how crappy your work is (Mommy, me rite story!), second level you have acquired sufficient skill to see what a sad sack you are, third level you aren’t near so crappy as you think, fourth level you’re good and you know how & why.

                  Might be appropriate for a re-run*, eh, Sarah?

                  *If memory has once again betrayed me, forget I said anything. Have some cheesecake.

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                    1. I have a sneaking suspicion that levels two, three, and four are a repeating cycle.

                      2. I know I suck at this thing, so I will practice and research until I find a way not to.
                      3. I know I suck at this thing, but now I know how to improve it. Practice!
                      4. I have conquered the suck, and now I know I’m good at that skill. Oh, expletive, I now know enough to realize that there’s this other area/a new level I could reach I couldn’t see before where I suck compared to where I want to be. Goto 2.

                      Yeah, that’s my life.

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                    2. That’s a good f’rinstance. Skill is the ability to quickly find and correct the suckage. Talent is the ability to avoid the suckage. Skill takes over where talent runs out.

                      In his intro to Speaker for the Dead Orson Card discusses the ways in which solving certain authorial challenges enable you to tackle greater challenges. For example, until you can write a credible character you cannot credibly write a character’s chameleonic filling of multiple roles.

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                  3. Level 3.5 – you’re beginning to see lack of suckage but have learned enough to begin to see how much more there is to learn.

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  16. I’ve said before that I have a totally different view of “talent”, and that, for me, is what makes my blood boil when I hear someone say, “I don’t have the talent for it”.

    YOU. DO. NOT. NEED. TALENT. TO. DO. THINGS.

    You need either observational skills (good observation will allow you to learn quite a bit about how to do something physical), or a trainer, for physical things, or access to educational materials and possibly teachers, for intellectual pursuits, plus lots and lots of practice. You need talent to become the BEST at something, or else you need to be in a field where the talented people don’t work hard. Talent is like a turbocharger, or a bottle of nitrous oxide connected to your engine: it doesn’t make your car go. It makes it go faster. Your task is to drive the car. Practice makes you a better driver.

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      2. That’s actually not true. I was a champion worker at the plastics plant where I once worked, and I hated every minute of it.

        On the other hand, I’m of the opinion that I can learn to do anything better than average (so long as I have the equipment, so don’t go bringing up birthing babies), because those who won’t put in the effort bring down the average. And when I am given a new task, I put in the effort to become, if not expert, at least strongly competent, because it irks me to do a lousy job.

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        2. That’s integrity. The job itself may suck, but you’d much rather do it right the first time than half ass it and have to fix it later.

          Being good at the job makes sense in that case. Because the alternative isn’t worth considering.

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    2. Talent/no talent can bite both ways. ‘No talent’ is a nice excuse not to try at all, while having obvious talent can make you think you don’t need to practice all that much because you can maybe even get to that ‘good enough’ level with no real work. And when you notice you can’t seem to get past some point even if you have been told you have talent the excuse can become that hey, not enough talent after all since it wasn’t easy when the real problem more likely is not enough work.

      I guess I hate the idea ‘talent means it will always be easy’ idea most. I really used to believe that, and it’s one reason why I haven’t spend much time trying to develop those talents I do have into something useful until now. I just used to figure that it would be no use since I couldn’t really have them after all as I didn’t become a master overnight those times I played with them a little. So if I thought I maybe did I was just being arrogant.

      Well, another reason is that I grew up in a family which didn’t much appreciate any kind of artistic stuff since it wasn’t real work, unless you were maybe talking about somebody like Shakespeare or Leonardo da Vinci (or old Finnish masters who were mostly these distinguished looking old gentlemen who habitually mingled with the creme of the land when anybody talked about them) and of course nobody ordinary could hope to reach that high, only unless it was that high it was mostly just waste of time. Just get a good education in something practical, girl.

      And I know that’s basically the leftist idea of soulless conservatives who don’t understand art, but it really is what my family seemed to think. I guess I managed to kind of fall between the cracks when I was a kid. My family didn’t really think of any art as a useful career choice, while the society around me on the other hand seemed to go much for that sort of thinking where true talent, passion and deep feelings are all that is needed and society should support those people since of course the true artists are too highwhatever to think about something as crass as money. That thinking where an actor throwing their own crap on the audience (one local scandal a few decades ago… :)) can become a highly meaningful show of artistic talent if there is enough feeling behind the act and somebody is good with bullshitting afterwards. Nobody around me approached the subject as learning a craft – talent can help, but then you work at it and learn the ropes, and what you aim for is producing something people will be willing to pay for.

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      1. Okay, to clarify: the impression I had when I was young was that basically, in order to succeed as an artist of any kind you would need to be so hugely talented that it showed so well even in the very beginning that you’d have critics and teachers and whatnot falling at your feet – which seemed to be how the society around me thought about it, and mind you, the ones ‘discovering’ you would need to be the teachers and the critics and other people who were professionals when it came to appreciating art, not the public in general, that would come only after the pros had declared you to be an Artist – or you should not waste too much time with that stuff since it was not and could never be Real Work.

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          1. But you had the guts to go for it anyway.

            I have started and stopped, rinse and repeat, several times. I have always had the need to do, but I have also always been embarrassed about the whole thing.

            Embarrassed because, well, you know all these jokes about people who talk a lot about their art, and when it’s finally seen it’s, well, embarrassingly bad? The artist looks proud while the other characters shuffle their feet and try desperately to find something nice to say? I used to figure I was probably exactly that artist/writer.

            So I’d start doing, produce something, try to learn techniques and practice, but sooner or later the embarrassment would win over the need, and I’d again quit for a while, until sooner or later the need would again to start to win over the fear.

            And going at it like I have really is a waste of time.

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            1. I’m going to disagree with you. You are not s good as if you had kept at it, but much better than those who tried and stopped, ONCE. As long as you keep trying, even if you stop occasionally, you are making progress.

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  17. Thank you for laying all this out; it’s timely for me. I’m the retired lead in an intentional community (windward.org) founded on Heinlein’s The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, and focused on passing along as much insight as I can to my replacement. The life-expectancy of intentional communities is very short, and we’re well into our fourth decade, so people tend to think that we survived because I was especially talented at building community. Looking back, I don’t think of it that way. Having Heinlein for a mentor (via his writings) was key, but mostly it was a matter of persistence–of continually coming back to the table and trying something new when an old way was no longer working, of honing skills and accumulating a set of skills and practices that worked well enough. You describe the process very well, and I’m enjoying passing your blog on to the hearty youngsters that are endeavouring to pick up the baton and continue building on Heinlein’s vision.

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    1. You also chose the right book, considering how poorly communities based off Stranger in a Strange Land have fared.

      I always cringe when someone says Stranger was their first Heinlein on this one Heinlein forum I read. Orphans of the Sky was mine. I was 8.

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      1. Orphans in the Sky may have been my first — I think it was in the two-volume Treasury of Science Fiction that the SF book club put out. But the one(s) I first recall would be Have Spaceship and Door Into Summer, all at around tenth grade, so … 14? I am currently listening to the audiobook of Door and marveling at the economics … proof that even the maestro needed tome to get past the fashions of the times. Yet, in acknowledging that the cars built for the crusher were fourth-rate at best, perhaps he was undermining the current economics rather than merely confused by them. Certainly it is an effective indictment of planned economy, whether intentional or subconscious.

        I recall reading Verne & Wells as my start down the SF rabbit-hole, perhaps because that’s all that was available in my youth, although the Tom Swift Jr. books fit in there as well.

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        1. I hadn’t thought of it before, but since you mention it, I suspect that the cars meant for the crusher was an extension of the concept of subsidies like those for milk, which, I am given to understand, resulted in things like a small farmer being paid for the milk his cows produced, then the milk dumped.

          I don’t really know what was my first Heinlein book – I think probably either Starship Troopers or Stranger, though I didn’t read any of them until age 20.

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      2. I came late – age 35 or so and Starship Troopers. I’ve been working my way through the other books since then – minus Stranger, Cat WWTW, and Job.

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        1. I generally like his juveniles more than his later work. RAH got kind of weird after SiaSL, and my disbelief has become less easy to suspend.

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          1. My experience as well. I’ve read most of his juveniles. I found Farnham’s Freehold not to my tastes.

            Though All You Zombies is the absolute killer ultimate time travel story.

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      3. I stumbled across Starship Trooper in 9th grade, and eagerly went from there. You’re certainly right that some of the Heinlein inspired communities took “interesting” paths, and I found Heinlein’s hesitancy to recognize any of his “bastards” to be quite understandable. Over time, our community proved itself to be the stolid, reasonable ones ;) by doing things like operating a foundry and running blood drives. Eventually Virginia gave us permission to quote at length from his works in our newsletter as we undertook to explain our conceptual roots.

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  18. “You know the instinctive feeling you have for allusion, connotation and denotation? Gone. ”

    Well, gone no more. I am regularly awed by your facility with idiom and allusion. You use idioms I haven’t heard used since my grandparents used them. That’s a compliment, btw. Clearly you are far more knowledgeable and skilled in American English, in all its warts and glory, than am I, a native speaker of approximately your same age. Regardless of one’s “talent” in languages, that level of proficiency can ONLY be the result of hard, hard work over a long time. I salute you, madame.

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    1. Thank you. It WAS hard-hard work. ;) The outdated idioms are PROBABLY either Heinlein’s fault or the fact I used to sit in diners early morning with a notebook and write down inventive uses of language by the people heading to manual labor jobs and having breakfast. (What? I loved the atmosphere.)

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      1. I don’t think of them as outdated. I think they should be brought back. Not that I’m working that cause at all, though. And I just remembered, you lived in NC (right?), so that would link culturally, if not geographically, with my peoples’ background. So, yeah.

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  19. Talent isn’t enough, but it does exist. I wanted to be a comic book artist when I grew up (back when I wanted to grow up). I practiced, I read books, I picked up techniques, and I never got any better than mediocre. I might have been able to make it in the comic industry circa 1940 (have you ever seen an early Superman comic?). I didn’t have the talent for the modern comic industry.

    On the other hand, I do have a talent for cooking. And for years I thought “That can’t be talent. It’s too easy.”. But I kept meeting people who literally cannot follow a proven recipe and produce edible food.

    Talent isn’t enough. You need to practice HARD to make it work. But lack of talent leaves you with a diabolical blind spot that no amount of practice will fill in. If you don’t have an essential talent for something, you can still have a lot of fun with it. My years of practice at drawing gave me an understanding of graphic arts that greatly increases my enjoyment of them. And I have some drawings (one of the Horned Lord, in particular) that I did by myself that I am very pleased with. I do, sometimes, get what’s in my head onto the paper. I just can’t do it consistently. You don’t have to have the stunning talent of a josh Groban to enjoy singing. Hell, the recent history of Pop Music proves conclusively that you can be absolutely talent-proof when it comes to music, and have a long career in musical Show Biz (but you probably have to have some other talent. Say, for showmanship).

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    1. For an example of the importance of talent to a comic book artist, check this link — http://www.schlockmercenary.com/2000-06-12 — then roll forward to today’s entry at that site.

      If you ever get the chance, look at the first year of Milt Caniff’s wonderful Terry and the Pirates comic strip to see an artist’s development from rawest amateur to master of the medium over a year’s work. Caniff, with aid of such friends as Noel Sickles, rose to the challenge of producing professional grade illustration on a daily basis and that first year is a time-lapse documentation of his growth. Absolutely amazing.

      For many, “talent” is the ability to analyse what isn’t working and the willingness to find solutions.

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      1. I have a reprint of the first Terry and the Pirates story. It’s still great, and better than average art by a long shot, but it’s nowhere near where Caniff was five-ten years later.

        As an aside, the cartoons in old newspapers are why it takes me so long to do newspaper research. :)

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          1. Not yet. The special supplements rarely got converted to microfilm unless they were about local history or notables. I suspect collectors snarfed them out of the archives, or they were not saved with the rest of the paper.

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          2. I have the first volume of the Spirit Archives (I’m studying Eisner both as a part of my self-tutelage in Getting My Drawing Chops Back and as a master course in storytelling — a recommended resource for either or both). By the time Eisner got to the Spirit, he was already a developed, world-class professional, so his early efforts were quite polished. Still… It’s possible to tell that he knew what he was about and where he wanted to go.

            I suspect what most people confuse with talent is really an affinity for the drudgery necessary to that 10,000 hours. A receptiveness to the tingle you get when it works and the long days of boring repetition

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  20. For many folks, talent is an impediment. They attempt a task, reveal a talent for it and as a result never apply themselves to the hard work of developing that talent. Stories are that Michael Jordan, attending basketball camps while in high school, met many players more talented than he. So talented they didn’t have to put in the long hard hours practicing. So as a result they topped out in college, having spent their free time chasing tail, doing drugs, partying all night while the less talented Jordan spent his free time developing his talent.

    There is a story about the great LA Dodgers manager, Tommy Lasorda, when he was plying his “apprenticeship” managing the Dodgers rookie team. The year’s phenom had taken the mound, faced his first few batters and injured his neck watching line drives slash by.

    When Lasorda trudged out to the mound to advise a hot shower for the phenom he looked at Lasorda, puzzled.

    “I don’t understand it, Coach. In school I was striking out 14, 16 guys a game.”

    “Kid, you remember the one or two guys on the opposing team you couldn’t get out? Those are the guys who made it to this level.”

    The truly important talent is the talent to adapt, to grow, to meet challenges, to challenge yourself. It is said that as a young law student Richard Nixon was advised he had the talent required to become a good lawyer: an iron butt. Talent — easy affinity for the tasks required — will only get you started. Talent is like the smile in the Al Capone quip: “You can go a long way with a smile. You can go a lot farther with a smile and a gun.”

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  21. Trust me, considering the quality of some of the authors on the bestsellers list, talent is NOT a requirement.

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    2. Correction; Talent for awaiting or storytelling is not a requirement. Talent for sucking up to editors, or pushing the public’s buttons can be substituted. But you need some kind of talent.

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    3. Yeah – I think everyone has some talent(s) – few have the talent to become really good, fewer still the will to work until they’re as good as they’ll ever get.

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  23. The general concept of talent is wrong, in the first and final analysis.

    What we should be terming it is as “aptitude”. Couple aptitude with desire and work, and you may get something worthwhile. Couple an aptitude with disinterest, and you have the girl who can sing like a bird, but who never does anything with it. The interest and desire have to actually be there, in order for the aptitude at a given task or skill to amount to anything.

    If you’ve got no interest in being a writer, the ability to string together words in a glib and pleasing manner will never amount to writing the great American novel. If, on the other hand, you’ve got the knack, and the desire…?

    There’s a corollary that flows along with this duality of aptitude and desire: Rarely do you find people who enjoy doing things that come easily to them. It’s just not challenging enough.

    I worked with a guy who was probably one of the greatest naturally talented musicians I ever met–This guy could literally play anything he picked up, and anyone hearing him play or sing instinctively gravitated towards him whenever he let loose. I watched him walk up to a band at a venue, take over each instrument in turn, and move what was looking like a very boring jam session by a bunch of hacks into the sort of event that sucked in people like some kind of black hole. That coffee shop went from “Near empty with a group of hippies playing instruments badly” to “Major improvisational music event, standing room only” in about ten minutes.

    I asked him, afterwards, why on God’s green earth he hadn’t gone into music instead of the military. His reply was very educational for me, in a lot of ways, because it crystallized some of my own thinking: With an evocative shrug of his shoulders, his reply was “It’s too easy, for me…”.

    What was he doing with his life, instead? Something that challenged him, and which he had minimal aptitude for. To be supremely talented at something is to be cursed, in some ways. This is why we usually see the people who have only a little bit of talent, and a lot of desire to succeed at something, surpass those who have great natural talent, but who never take the time to develop it.

    Unless you put a gun to their heads, those with supreme natural aptitude will rarely take up anything that plays into that inborn skill and ability. That’s something I’ve observed, time and time again. Genius doesn’t mean squat, unless it’s coupled with desire and motivation for hard work.

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  24. If I’m not mistaken, the whole use of the word “talent” for an aptitude goes back to a particular New Testament parable. In that parable, several servants of the king were entrusted with talents (which in the day was a quantity of money, and a substantial one) while he was away. When he came back, he asked each to account for what he had done with the money. A couple of the servants had invested wisely, made a killing, and were well rewarded b the king. But one servant had simply buried it in the ground for safekeeping. The king was not amused, asking why the servant could not at least have lended the money at interest.

    The application to “aptitude” seems clear enough. The aptitude is a gift. If you don’t work with it, though, you’re not going to prosper.

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  25. There was an article going around last year about how telling kids they are “smart” is actually kneecapping them. The rationale goes like this: A kid who hears that she is smart (and it happens more often to girls) equates “smart” with “easy”—that is, she thinks she should be able to grasp things quickly because she is smart, and if she doesn’t grasp something quickly this a) means she is not smart and b) that she should not pursue it. However, if you praise a kid’s effort, they are more likely to rise to challenges and attempt difficult tasks, which are both skills that are valuable. We’ve been implementing this with our kindergardener by telling him that practice makes you better at things; he was definitely trying to quit in frustration on some tasks before we did that.

    “Talent” is the same thing—aptitude means nothing if practice and effort aren’t there. I have an aptitude for engineering, but after a year and a half in that major I realized that I didn’t have the drive (I really wasn’t enjoying myself and was exceedingly stressed.) I know why I didn’t go into engineering and it has nothing to do with “talent.” On the other side, I also know why I’m not in acting. Someone with much drive and effort could overcome my natural handicaps, and I know I didn’t have that amount of drive and effort. (I’m too tall and not “pretty”* enough to be an ingenue, and if you think that doesn’t matter for the mid-range actresses you don’t know how theater works.)

    *”Pretty” is a particular feature style, not a judgement call IMO. Put it this way—I’ll make a MARVELOUS Granny Weatherwax when I hit my 70s.

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    1. P.S. I’m the “smart one.” My brother is the rocket scientist. Mind you, I’m happy with my life choices, and he’s pretty intelligent too, but I wonder how much hearing about how his little sister was so smart shaped his determination.

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  26. I try and warn my bright-and-coasting high school students that they will hit a wall in college if they don’t start learning to study, but what do I know?

    Someone praised a history article I wrote because it flowed so well and was so “effortless.” I’m glad they didn’t see the four revisions, weekly trips back to the archive to add about 25% more comparative material, and the mass of red-ink copy edits. And taking my dissertation from “not bad at all” to “excellent” has cost me probably 200-300 hours of work and research travel thus far, once you start adding all the hours up. I don’t think the students want to hear about that, either. :)

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    1. I try and warn my bright-and-coasting high school students that they will hit a wall in college if they don’t start learning to study, but what do I know?

      I had that problem myself. Everyone had told me that college would be different, and much more difficult. But they’d said that about HS and even Jr. HS, and they’d been lying then, so why should I believe them regarding college?

      Unfortunately by the time I discovered that they were finally telling the truth, I had developed horribly self-defeating study habits, so college was…much more difficult than it needed to be:-(.

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      1. I was ready for college to be harder than HS, but it wasn’t, until I had coasted through 2 years. Even then, the only class that really was as intense (To me, that is – yeah, I slurp math and science like a vampire at a blood bank. Other people were struggling in my “easy” classes.) as I had been told was German, and by the time I realized I was not doing enough work in it, it was too late to catch up.

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    2. The skill of a true professional is to hide the effort employed. Watch Fred Astaire, Gene Kelly, Ray Bolger, Bob Fosse, Tommy Tune* or any of the great dancers and you see an “effortless” born of countless hours practice to remove any evidence of effort.

      *For that matter, Ginger Rogers, Ann Miller, Gwen Verdon, Chita Rivera, Cyd Charisse …

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      1. Heck, one guy I worked with, years ago, could scribe plumb-straight lines by hand, calculate most flow diagrams by eye, and hold the idea of a complete system in his head (back before Pex became common, plumbing was a different beastie entirely). I asked him how in the world he did that, and he just shrugged and said,

        “Do this job, rain or shine, day in and day out every day for thirty years. You’ll be able to do it, too.”

        I’ve seen and done enough since to actually believe that, now. Not that I’m ever going to be a patch on that kind of accomplishment, but at least I know it is possible.

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  27. Some people have a talent for storytelling. I wouldn’t say it’s some sort of ingrained mode of operation, but likely their *real* talent is the ability to pick up the hows and whys of other storytellers. Through conscious or unconscious observation, they absorb the entertainer’s tools used to hold an audience.

    Everyone can do that. The rare ones get there quicker; the rest of us, it takes work. And hard work is hard work…that’s why someone such as yourself, viewed through the spyglass of tenacity, deserves that much more respect for what you’ve accomplished.

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  28. I forget who wrote it, or exactly how it was worded .. I do know it was over on Ace of Spades at some point .. the point was made that hollywood and news writers value *their* skills in others, and – there were statistics – showed that newsies tended to write positive stories about people in semi-parallel (written-word, communications, and so on) fields, but negative stories (if at all) about people in completely different (wrench-turning, laser-building, crop-planting) fields.

    I also think – I can’t prove it with facts i have on paw, and don’t intend to go trying to find it – that hollywood and news writers frequently *don’t understand* why they are successful.. or why someone in a non-aligned field would be successful .. so they fall back on tropes rather than reality.

    There are genetic differences, and obviously they play a role .. as do early childhood experiences and young adulthood exposures and later skill-identification and honing processes .. but to call the whole thing “talent” is .. were I a kind and gentle cat, I would call it “grossly oversimplifying”. As I am myself, I call it damaging maligning of the role of hard work in success.

    There are natural talents, but .. left un-honed, they are rather meaningless… and they do not entitle one to go from the sidelines onto the court for the New York Nicks or from the audience to the stage to sing the lead in “Miss Saigon” .. If you want *those* jobs, you must have a talent, and a passion, and have it discovered early so it can be honed… and the odds against all three are quite significant.

    Mew

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    1. My voice teacher in college said that singers just have to get used to not really knowing what they sound like or how good they are, because voice production is partly an involuntary muscle thing anyway, and because recordings aren’t perfect, and because you don’t hear yourself in the act of singing the same way that people outside your head hear you.

      I think this is applicable to many fields of endeavor.

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  29. In the dark of night, in the silence of my own heart, I know that you need to keep the knives away from me, feed me something full of protein, and never never ask me questions like that unless you want me to go into some kind of fit.

    Yeah, I don’t like self-evaluation/suicidal ideation time at work.

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  30. Some years ago I was dating an artist. She took me to the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena, and we talked about the art.

    It became clear she saw things in the paintings that I just didn’t, at least not without having them pointed out. I left convinced that what she was seeing was real, but I would probably always be fairly blind to it.

    An eye-opening experience. So to speak.

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    1. This is why I think kids should get music training in their education: not because every little La’Shawn and Emily have a future as first chair in the orchestra, but so they can learn enough about music to appreciate the stuff slightly more challenging than “Ooh, you hot. Me hot. Let’s do something stupid.” to a repetitive sound sample.

      I once took a friend to see a Monet exhibit. He tried really hard to be enthusiastic, because I was, but he was pretty puzzled. Finally, he admitted “Um, this one- irises. What’s an iris?”

      So we ditched the museum and spent the day going through florist shops – because the ability to appreciate an impression requires the ability to recognize the subject, first.

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      1. My mom ended up having to tell some art students the Bible stories depicted in the paintings at the Nelson-Strecker (K.C., MO) so they could do their college assignment. They’d never heard of John the Baptist, apparently. Which makes it kinda hard to describe the symbolism used by the Renaissance painters in Northern Europe.

        Mom taught herself enough art history to have the equivalent of a Masters in late Medieval and Renaissance art.

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      2. +1 Yea– I do miss more challenging music on the radio. Plus the kids ruin their hearing early so they can’t hear the difference between sharp, flat, or in tune.

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        1. The local public radio station plays classical until 7PM, when they switch to jazz. I keep my radio on that so that my kids get the classical exposure every time they’re in the car. (I have tons of classical CDs on our digital database… if I were ever to remember to put music on to play. Too many years being the youngest in my family with no power over the electronics—I’ve never learned to put on music.)

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          1. LOL – oh well I was the oldest of nine– I was given too much responsibility but no power. the parentals controlled the electronics or the younger sons pulled them apart to see how they worked.

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          2. That hasn’t worked so well for me. The kids’ definition of classical music is “the stuff Dad listens to with all the screeching sopranos.”

            Um, yeah, Baroque choral is a favorite. How’d you guess?

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        2. I usually end up liking several of the new pop tunes each year, but what I like is always just a small slice of what is offered. Most of that music is so boring, something that is maybe more tolerable as background music than something like elevator muzak – or what the store where I do the hours for the second job now has on – but not something you’d actually like to really listen to. Especially if the radio is not on loud. Hell of a lot of that music really does sound a lot better when its on really loud, but when you listen to it on a level which is more kind to ones ears… boring.

          Maybe the kids have the same problem, would explain why they tend to go for levels which you may hear completely well even when one of them is listening something through earbuds (love those, by the way, much less annoying that the habit some had when I was a teen, which was dragging a ghettoblaster around and letting everybody listen to something whether they wanted or not :) ).

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          1. yea – exactly– although we used to take those boom boxes to parks with a group of teenagers and dance. Some of the parks had cement around the tables–

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          2. But, but, without using a giant boom box, how can you let people know that you like the cool, hip, “real” music? Besides shaking your car apart with woofers too large for a semi, that is.

            True Story: A kid in a “boomcar” pulled up beside me in traffic one day and inflicted rap on me. I cued up the first track on the “Shaka Zulu” soundtrack, cranked the volume on my stereo, and let ‘er rip. I think I won.

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              2. Toccata in Fugue in D Minor for Organ, by Johann Sebastian Bach.

                Very useful for wringing out a speaker system… and completely overpowering the thud-thud-thud of cars nearby. :-D

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                1. Imperial March, maybe. :) Lucas managed to make me lose my liking for those movies, I no longer enjoy even the original trilogy much because I can’t ignore the stupid backstory he later gave us, but I still like the soundtracks.

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                2. Eh, no, because I played that for an organ recital, and so I start listening and critiquing the registration, playing technique, choice of instrument, tempi . . .

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            2. I travel with kids (….I think I just found my werewolf name. “Travels with Kids.”) so I need to always be ready to silence things that shouldn’t be said in front of consenting adults, let alone my kids.

              My solution:

              WITH CAT-LIKE TRED! (BOOM) UPON OUR PREY WE STEAL (BOOM)
              IN SILENCE DREAD (BOOM) OUR CAUTIOUS WAY WE FEEL (BOOM)
              NO SOUND AT ALL (BOOM) WE NEVER SPEAK A WORD—

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              1. I have the new My Little Pony soundtrack. Fear!

                (I have a Canadian bagpipe band progressive jazz album that I was forbidden to play in my dorm, sadly enough. Apparently Pink Floyd and the Dead at all hours from other rooms wasn’t too loud, but bagpipes magically were.)

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  31. I am of the opinion that there is an amazing amount of talent in the world. Here, there, everywhere. It takes a huge inner drive to make something of it. Luck does help, especially in the music world, but the main factor is the drive to do it. I think You Tube has revealed a world of talent that wasn’t known before. The local ladies (and men) who sing in church every Sunday; act, sing, dance and perform at little theater groups; people who write blogs; they are out there and many of them do not have the ambition or drive or even care about being on the national stage. They enjoy their lives as they are.

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  32. Haven’t read the comments yet, so I’m sure 20 people have already made the points I’m going to, but I’ll put this up before I head out the door anyways.

    You make your own luck; at least that is what I was always told growing up, and believe.

    There is such a thing as talent, but it needs trained, conditioned and exercised regularly. I always tend to relate everything to training dogs, but often they are good examples. I have two littermates here right now, about a year and half old. One I raised from a puppy, she is a nice talented young dog, who just needs a little polishing and continued experience to make nice good, well trained, hunting dog. My dad has a littermate in a similar, if slightly less far along position. The other littermate I have out here, is a friend of mine’s dog, which spent most of its young life in kennel. Well taken care of, but not trained or exposed to other dogs. It is a nice pet, and knows it’s name and to come when called. Now I believe it has the talent for hunting, just like it’s littermates. I’ve seen flashes of it a couple times, but it has no training or experience (well didn’t, remedying that is what I’m supposed to be doing). But really a talentless dog that has had lots of training and experience will be more useful than this dog is currently; even though without the bred in talent they will never be good, that talent has to be trained and thoroughly conditioned to be useful.

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  33. “Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence.
    Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent.
    Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb.
    Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts.
    Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent.
    The slogan “Press On” has solved and always will solve the problems of the human race.”
    — Calvin Coolidge

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  34. My kids all spend hours drawing in notebooks and with computer programs, hours and hours and hours. Stacks and stacks of sketchbooks. They’re all pretty good. They have different levels of natural talent. They do. I can tell.

    The least talented has made the most money making artwork.

    Because the more talented siblings get caught up in artsy-fartsy ideas like… inspiration… and what they *feel* like drawing at any given time.

    I would never tell them that any is less talented than the other because we do sort of get hung up on the notion of talent. I think that it’s real and it exists, but of all the things that determine ultimate success, I think it’s probably the least important of all.

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