Jisu @ Hiatus · @JisuArtist
4th May 2017 from TwitLonger
Thoughts on 'talent'
To start, I want to preface this by saying that talent is not the sole factor in success. Success in many ways is determined by things out of our control (socioeconomic level, environment, resources, etc). I only made the twitter poll because of our culture's unique 'talent fetish' where we like to scrutinize how much nature dishes out advantages and disadvantages, whereas, in my opinion, factors like socioeconomic level are much more pervasive and predictive of someone's ability to climb the ladder of success. That all being said, I am going to keep this about my thoughts on the elusive 'talent' only, and keep all thoughts regarding the impact of extraneous factors out of this post.
So given this definition of talent: "a hereditary advantage over others granted by factors outside of one's own control" -- I think it's foolish to deny that this exists. There are very garish examples of this (eg. taller people will be better at basketball), but the question becomes very nuanced and hard to answer when we get into the physiology of our neurosystems. We as humans understand so little about our brains and sensory systems, that it's hard say how much of a factor its composition equates to progress later in life. Despite this, there is a lot of reason to believe that it does.
One area of discussion that the idea of 'talent' touches upon is the great discussion between nature v. nurture. I think I lean towards the nature side, meaning that I believe that what we are given at birth has slightly more impact than our surroundings. I personally believe that humans are not born blank slates. While we are largely formed by our environment -- this lends itself to the idea that more resources and better stimuli directly correlates to progress. How then do we explain the children who are given everything to be amazing and do not succeed? Or the child who was born with nothing and always finds a way to express their apparent gifts? This idea falls apart when you examine different groups of people and see that-- despite all the different backgrounds and levels of wealth-- the distribution of individuals on the spectrum of success is largely the same. You'll see the top 1%, the overwhelming majority somewhere in the middle, and then the unfortunate minorities at the bottom -- a bell-curve spectrum.
Back in the day, I used to be involved in orchestra. I was ranked pretty high in the system. I was not the best, but I did get to see many people who had much better assets (better instrument, better practice regime) who routinely did worse than me. That's when my quest to understand what determines skill began. One thing I noticed is that people who were good at music were also good at studying and also at sports and also at their hobbies-- basically, they were good at whatever they set their minds to. This conclusion made me think that 'talent' is just a paraphrase of intelligence. The greatest skill one can acquire is the skill of "getting good", and the smarter you are, the faster you will figure that out. To reference some of your guys' replies, this would be the equivalent of a multiplier: skill = intelligence(hardwork + time)
That explained to me why some individuals-- despite spending considerably less time and effort-- just get good. It makes sense: the higher your IQ, the faster your brain processes new patterns and applies them. However, this didn't explain those savants who are so incredibly impaired in different areas but proportionately amazing at some specific task. One notable example is Stephen Wiltshire. I learned of this autistic savant when I was much younger, but it left a considerable impression on me because I had to re-evaluate my entire conclusion on talent. This is someone who is noticeably impaired in everyday areas of life, but can somehow reproduce entire cityscapes in a drawing after a short helecopter ride. This type of talent would be like if everyone else's brains had a square, triangle, and circle hole, but the savant's brain only had a star hole. I then concluded that intelligence is just one type of talent amongst many others, such as the hyper-specialized neural-connections found in a savant. One trend remained the same though-- the faster and more efficient your neural connections, the better you will be.
The common retort after this then is that you can speed up your neural connections with practice over time. This is common sense, and no one is denying that. Obviously, someone who has practiced 10 years more than the unpracticed person is going to come to the right conclusion much faster. However, talent is such a prevalent concept because it seems that no matter how much a group of people may practice together in the same-fashion -- someone always edges everyone else out. Why is this? Well if you think about "talent" as a multiplier, you will see that having an edge from the very beginning results in exponential growth over time. So the reason why someone has an easier time forming the right conclusions and applying them is simple math.
"So what's even the point?" -- well, analyzing these topics is fun and all, but it's all just theory. Like I said, success is a result of many things, and its very likely that many people just aren't getting enough of one factor in their equation for success. Imagine if Stephen Wiltshire had never touched a pencil in his life-- his talents would be unknown and he would go down in history as just another mentally disabled person. Additionally, if you take the idea of talent being a multiplier even further, you'll realize that it only matters if the same amount of time and hardwork is put in as everyone else. That's why I say that talent exists, but it only matters at the tippy-top -- where everyone else has maxed their stats. BUT-- in all fields, no one has maxed out the stats. No one has pushed the extent of any discipline to its furthest, and that is why you should push to be the best you can be. You never know where your journey may take you, and you never know where your journey will take your discipline. Who knows, maybe one day life will throw at you the formula to be a great influence and you can change the world, despite your humble beginnings. To end, I reference this quote (allegedly) made by Albert Einstein: "Everyone is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid."