Talent

What even is talent, anyway? I tend not to think about this a lot, since I don't believe that it's very productive to focus on things that you can't control. However, the philosophical side nibbles at this occasionally, and since it is a real world topic that affects people everyday(depending on how pessimistic or gifted they are), I guess it's worth thinking about.

In the intuitive, casual sense, talent is what you have when doing something comes easy to you, up to the point where you're doing it better than other people. There's sort of a dichotomy kind of mindset when people think about the thing. Either you're pure talent or pure hard work. Such is the archetype of tales that want to push the idea of getting kids to believe in themselves, anyway. 

There's an idea that purely working hard will get you past any talent barrier that's out there. I don't really think that's a healthy way to think about things. For one, there's an implication that you need to surpass all those talented kids with your hard work, which is kind of comparative, and we all know comparison makes people miserable. Maybe the truth is that only one percent can be the top 1%, and maybe you don't really need to beat everyone else to be happy. 

The other thing is that most people are average. You're statistically most likely to be near the peak of that normal distribution, so to speak. So, if you do want to perform better than average, I don't really doubt that a sprinkle of passion, a consistent routine, and a good training method would get you further than most. Here's an example. On chess.com, a Rapid rating of about 1300 is considered intermediate, depending on who you ask. That's still around 90th percentile, the top 10% on the site, with over 40 million members. Now, whether or not that's nice or depressing depends on how you see it, but that's a little perspective. Maybe I should write something about comparison one day.

Another thing. Remember when I mentioned the dichotomy of "pure talent and pure hard work"? I don't really believe in that obviously. I think everyone has some innate inclination towards different things, to varying degrees. There's no "drawing gene" just in the same way there's no specific "music gene" or "math gene". There are different skills that some might be better at than others, but I think that fields are pretty wide these days, and it's easier to stand out if you play to your own strengths. Maybe a boxer doesn't pack as much of a punch as others in his weight class, but he's really good at keeping his distance and landing sick counter punches. Who knows. All I'm saying is that there's some nuance to this. Hell, I think there's a ton of factors that contribute to someone's performance. Timing? Enviroment? Prior experience of transferable skills? Who knows. The human brain is pretty complex.

Anyways, there's also something to be said about how gifted kids are raised and how it's not all it's cracked up to be, but I think I'll come back to that some other time.

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