I missed a blog post yesterday, so already we are off to a rocky start.
I wanted to talk about talent. It’s a topic that’s not all that well understood. I saw a post in an online forum the other day (a dangerous place to be) that said, “What’s more important, talent or hard work,” and it really got me thinking. I’m definitely not one to toot my own horn, but I’ve been told throughout my life that I’m talented. I started playing music at a very young age and got pretty good at a really young age. I started playing drums professionally when I was about 13 or 14.
So yeah, I was aware that I had talent, but I had no idea what it meant. Well, I had an idea. I think that idea was wrong and I’ve been critically evaluating that idea all my life.
You see, I thought talent meant that something came naturally, which meant you either got it or you didn’t, and if you did get it, it would be easy. It wouldn’t be a struggle. In turn I took that to mean that if you are struggling to get something and you’ve been told your talented, then you must be barking up the wrong tree. Better not try that. You’re not talented at that.
So yeah I’m here to admit that I’ve been lazy and avoided hard work because I thought I just wasn’t cut out for it. Do you wanna know how I recognized this?
Therapy? Nope. Probably wouldn’t hurt though ;)
Parenting? Yes.
My wonderful, truly brilliant and gifted son Eddie, struggles with this issue. And I’ve got a front row seat from an omniscient (almost) position. My wife and I have been teaching him to read, write, count, do math, everything we know, much of it before he could even talk. You see, he’s on the autism spectrum, and he was diagnosed at 18 months. He also had speech apraxia and we were told that he might not ever speak. But we were undaunted. We kept trying to reach him, to teach him. Well, one day he started speaking in full sentences, when he was about 3 1/2.
Scared the shit out of us.
We had never heard his voice, other than some babbles and muffled attempts at speech.
But it turns out that even though he couldn’t speak, he was thinking in sentences. He was reading. He could do math. He was firing on all cylindars.
And it also turns out he really loves numbers. He loves them so much that for many of his early childhood years, that’s all he thought about. Numbers. Relationships between numbers. Prime numbers.
When he graduated Kindergarten, he had to pass a simple test with the teacher. She asked him to count starting at 6. She was expecting him to say, “6, 7, 8, 9….” Instead he said, “6, 12, 18, 24, 30, 36….” And without hesitation. He loved numbers and he really understood them.
Was it talent? I could clearly see that he was obsessed with numbers, so it was no surprise to me. He was always doing math. Nobody had to force him. He was putting in hours and hours of hard work getting comfortable with numbers, and to him, it was easy and FUN.
And I realized I was the same with music when I was young. I used to listen to music all day. When I was three my parents bought me a small kid’s drumset and I used to play along to records. And I never stopped. I put in thousands of hours listening to music, playing music, sitting at the piano, playing triads with different bass notes. I didn’t know I was practicing and learning. I was just having fun. I was truly passionate about music and nothing could stop me.
And that brings me to the crux of it. Talent and hard work are not opposing sides of a coin. Talent IS hard work. Talent is passion. Talent is the glossy finish we see on a wooden sculpture after the sculptor has spent thousands of hours polishing it delicately. We don’t see the hard work. We only see the result and we rush to explain it away.
Why is this distinction important?
It can have a tremendous effect on how we educate young people and what we allow them to perceive as strengths and shortcomings. How many adults today are living the dream? How many are doing a job they love versus a job that pays the bills? How many people truly have found what makes them happy?
I don’t think it’s a high percentage.
I never considered myself an artist. Even as a “talented” young improvising musician, I thought artist was a term reserved for painters and sculptors, for Renaissance men and women who made physical artworks. And so when I started to get interested in photography I felt conflicted because I didn’t feel I had any right to be making art. I didn’t think I had any talent. In fact, I always wished I could draw, illustrate, paint, and nobody ever nurtured my curiosity. I took an art class in middle school and spent 9 weeks drawing a plant with a pencil on paper. At the end of the 9 weeks of suffering, it was framed and put in the art show and I never tried anything like that ever again.
So yeah, I do think it’s an important concept to understand and to teach. Talent is a myth. Hard work is required to be good at anything. You have a good chance of being good at almost anything if you work hard at it and don’t give up. And if you start young, that hard work feels effortless. Here I am, at 45, trying my hand at art again. More to come.