So What Exactly is Talent?

 There seem to be two dominant opinions when it comes to the importance of talent. One is that talent is the whole show. The other is that talent doesn't really matter. And, like most big topics, it's not that simple. Still, I think most of us would agree that, whatever talent might be, we’d still like to have more of it.

It's relative
First of all, everyone has at least some talent -- many talents, in fact. If not, we'd all be lost. Even the worst drummer on the planet has a little bit of music aptitude.  But it actually requires a melange of qualities and aptitudes that combine to create 'talent'. So a bit of drumming talent, a bit of music talent, plus a bit of this and a bit of that and you've got a pretty good drummer.

I find that a bell curve can be helpful in understanding a multitude of human characteristics. For any given category, the low end of the curve represents the completely talentless. These people are very, very rare. For example, in my lifetime I've only met one person who was truly tone deaf.

At the other end of the scale are the extremely gifted ... geniuses in many cases. These too are quite rare, the “1-percenters’ in the field. And then there's the rest of us. Some are closer to the top of the bell curve, some are closer to the bottom, and most are somewhere in the middle. The good news is that, statistically speaking, fully half of us are above average!

The Core Abilities
Talented people seem to pick things up faster, more easily and earlier. They are fast, efficient and sometimes precocious learners and may show up as prodigies. They also seem to understand things better and make it a part of themselves almost without effort. Very young performers often give the impression that they've been at it for many years.

In order to capitalize on the no-doubt adequate talents we do have, we just need to feed, nurture, and experiment. It seems to me that we can divide the job into three critical processes or abilities:

1. Accumulate
This is what we do when we study, practice, memorize, listen, etc. Our personal degree of talent for learning has a direct effect on rate and capacity of learning.

2. Assimilate
Play it, own it, make it personal ... because it is. And it's not enough to just know it. You have to internalize and integrate new knowledge with what went before, to see how it fits into the whole.

3. Innovate
Here's where we roll out our natural curiosity and our creativity. What can you do with your skills and knowledge beyond simply reproducing what's gone before?

There’s no up side to worrying about how much talent you have or don’t have. That hard truth is that talent is pretty much fixed and there’s no way of increasing it. But honing what talent you have is freely available to everyone.

“I wasn't talented... but I was relentless!” - Neil Peart

A Few More “Talents” To Nurture
Attitude, sociability, drive, energy, determination (not the same as energy), nurturing, mentoring, dedication, attention , brain power & development, memory,  marketing savvy, to name a few.

Photo Credit: Andrey Kiselev | Dreamstime.com; Mieszko Stanislawski | Dreamstime.com