About Talent

Commonly recognized as a factual thing — just like intelligence and time, and just as problematic

Photo by Michel Catalisano on Unsplash

There have been many people in my life who I admired for their exceptional abilities in one or another direction — often composers or musicians, as I am very much fond of music, but writers, actors, sportsmen and -women, and actually also people who were not doing any of those things that normally would be connected with “a talent” but still managed to behave in a way that not everybody could have done.

I have also seen many times how people have been described with “brilliant”, “very talented”, and other superlatives, without really doing anything that could impress me.

At times, I even found that such people were indeed awful at it, not providing what I would consider good skills. Many singers and other performers would fall into that category.

In such cases, though, I have understood that beauty is in the eyes of the beholder, and the same counts for being brilliant.

So, I do recognize that some people are very good at something, maybe even so good that they are unique — nobody in the world will be able to do that. Wouldn’t that mean that they then had a special “talent”?

Not in my opinion. It depends on the definition of “talent”, of course, but just as a giraffe can eat the leaves at the top of a tree, and a frog can catch flies with its tongue, some people have a natural inclination for doing something. Basketball players are often better at the game if they are tall, because the game is constructed in such a way that this is an advantage. People with good eyesight and who are able to see all colors correctly are often better photographers and designers than those who lack those skills.

What a giraffe and a basketball player have in common, is not a talent: it’s a physiological advantage. And physical or psychological advantages help in many other respects, making it easier for some people than others to get success with a sport, art, or other human-made activity.

An animal that is doing what it evolved to do can hardly be said to be talented in this. It can do nothing else, so it is more like “built” for it, if you subscribe to the idea of intelligent design, or, indeed, has evolved to fit into a specific situation. The same animal wouldn’t necessarily be good at other things, hence the old idea of “you can’t judge a fish on its ability to climb trees, or a monkey on its ability to swim”.

What looks like a talent is often just a bodily and/or mental advantage that fits the situation.

Games and sports are made by human people to fit certain ideals.

Basketball was mentioned already, and even if it wasn’t specially designed for tall people, it is much easier for the tall ones to perform, as the baskets are hanging up high and are easier to but the ball in if you can lift your hands up just as high.

Golf is more complex, requiring a number of skills, along with a general good physical condition: you need to be able to swing your arms, so certain shoulder problems will make it difficult for you to play golf. You also need a good eyesight, or someone to help you see what you cannot see yourself, and a control of your muscles, enough for directing the swinging golf club in the right direction.

Singing opera requires a strong voice, which to some extent can be trained but needs a basis to train it from. You need to be able to match a tone that you hear with singing a similar tone, and you should be able to remember the lines, as an opera often requires you to sing for a longer duration without having a possibility to check the libretto. Several additional skills are needed too, making opera a somewhat difficult area to work in.

None of this is a talent. Unless you define long legs as a talent. Or good eyesight.

What makes the person who is excellent at one of these sports or other activities be better than others, is a combination of having the needed abilities in place or having found ways of overcoming them (such as an art painter using their feet instead of their hands to paint), having an understanding of the rules and scope of the activity: what is considered correct and good by the audience, and having enough of education and practice to be able to do it well.

I know that many people like to believe that some of us are born to do something special, better than anybody else. But I have never seen anything pointing in that direction. Not apart from the features that our genes have given us different levels of.

There is, though, another aspect: society and the support from the surroundings. It may be that you have great fingers, a sense of rhythm, and the mentality for practicing until you hit the right tone every time, and yet, you will never become a concert pianist, simply because you have no piano, nobody who can or will sponsor you, or, indeed, no acceptance from your surroundings that this is what you want to do. You maybe be forced to study and work with something else, and may even be punished in different ways for approaching a piano or just talking about it.

It can be even worse, since you may not know that pianos exist or that it could be possible to get such a life/job/career, or you know about this but have no idea that you would be able to do it.

Prodigies appear from time to time, and very young children are attributed for having written operas or done other amazing things, and even if we accept the fact that they are actually doing this themselves, with their own hands, which may not always be the case, they still need to have the needed tools within reach and some surroundings that let them do and support them, mainly by seeing that it happens and telling others about it, but also by ensuring the needed training and possibility to dedicate time for it.

The 3-year-old writing an opera is not a talent: they may be unusually skilled, but are mainly the instruments in the hands of people who want them to appear as prodigies.

Something similar can be the case also for larger children, young people, and adults. They can be driven by people around them to use their skills, get more training, become and be the talent.

This way, “talent” is a level of competence, a level of being, or doing, that comes as a result of dedication and effort, as well as recognition.

Talent is not consistent. It may be that the pianist, basketball player, or writer keeps performing the same all the time, even though this is not typical, but the eyes looking at it may not be the same — and different observers may see different things, different qualities.

This way, someone considered a great talent by some people, can receive negative reviews by others. It happens, that someone often considered talented is mentioned a “talent-less” by someone who is supposed to know — such as a professional reviewer.

I have myself experienced to be called a skilled writer — and yet to have my texts completely shot down and talked about as useless by editors. One of the latter commented something like “I don’t think people like you normally make so many mistakes”, referring to the fact that I am not a native English writer.

My guess is that everybody who is doing something that regularly receives reviews from others will have experienced something like that: being called amazingly good by some and hopelessly bad by others.

There is no talent in this. A talent cannot be both good and bad. The common idea of “talent” is that it is something that differs the person positively from the rest, something that makes the one better. But being better should not be a matter of subjective opinions, sometimes resulting in good reviews, at other times in bad. It should be permanently recognized as good.

But this doesn’t happen to anyone, so talent is not a thing.

The “non-native” comment is about prejudice, and we have a lot of that everywhere in the world. About all kinds of things, such as the country of origin, the “societal level” of your family (class, caste, etc.), skin color, gender, voice pitch, shoe size — you name it. People often cannot look beyond such things, and they value what they see and hear through a filter of prejudices. I would claim that we all have some, even if we genuinely try not to have any. We cannot always look at another person with a blank mind and just take in what they do as equal to what others do. We might be able to rationalize afterward and see how our prejudices have affected our immediate impression, but even that is not always enough to rectify our judgement.

The society we are part of also designates some of the possible activities as more valuable than others, meaning that in some societies, nobody will ever be called a talented golf player, since golf is not accepted there, or even worse, many art forms are directly banned and cannot be mentioned in the same sentence as “talent”. So, talent is only for selected areas. We decide as a society what a person potentially can be talented in, and what not.

In our commercialized Western world, we even combine what we see with what we know about the economical value. Meaning, a chef who is using a cheap brand of knives cannot be talented — “real” talents will know that knives must be expensive to be good, we think. Sports people need to wear accepted brands of cloth, or they even need to have certain, esteemed, sponsors, in order to have a chance to be seen as talents.

“Talent” is in many ways a loaded word, a word connected with status — and in this way, it is as often as not, being used negatively, to tell how much we dislike something, by calling it and its performer “without talent”.

We can enjoy a great performance, and we can admire great skills, great dedication, important initiatives, difficult decisions, and many, many other things.

But we shouldn’t sort these into talented or not. It doesn’t bring anything good to the table.