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April 10, 2005

Ranting About Talent

There's an ad playing on the radio now that sort of offhandedly presumes that great musicians and artists are born that way. I can't think of any better way to devalue the years of work and study that goes into developing real skill and experience in a field than to insist that the practitioner was born that way. As if the talent were no more than luck, and the reason the rest of us don't have it is not that we didn't work as hard, but that we somehow drew the short stick in the gene pool.

Obviously, that's not how I feel about talent. I do believe people are born with an innate preference for one thing or another -- some people don't like broccoli, if you can imagine that, so it seems obvious that some people would be born to like making music, or two like drawing things. Liking to do something means you're likely to do it whenever you can, and that translates into developing real skill in that area.

Some people believe that the cause and effect is flipped: that some people draw a lot because they are naturally good and get positive feedback for doing it, while others never draw well and so do not enjoy it. Which really doesn't make much sense to me, because everybody starts out the same, all floppy and unable. Even great artists had to learn to hold a pencil at some point in their lives, so obviously the ability is not innate. Maybe they have an ability to get into drawing headspace more easily than the rest of us, but I would argue that that skill is developed with time, not from some special genetic coding.

The thing is, sometimes it's hard to admit to envy. Envy makes us belittle the accomplishments of others -- say things like, "He's just got a natural talent for music" -- because if the other person had some special advantage, then the reason why you or I do not have his skill is that we were unlucky, rather than that we are lazy jackasses. Or, less childishly, rather than that we simply do not enjoy the practise of that skill enough to devote as much time and energy to it as the talented person.

This is all very close to home right now, because I'm changing from a world of words and intellectual structures to a world of pictures and diagrams. My classmates, who have very little life experience in general, tend to think there's some kind of miracle to my ability to read fast and structure writing. Seeing as how I spent the last twenty years developing that skill, I find it somewhat insulting to be told that it must be innate talent. My ability to memorize is an innate skill, given to me by the particular makeup of my brain structure and chemistry. My ability to read a manuscript and edit it to make a structured, reasonable argument, on the other hand, was hard-won. As hard-won, I would say, as their ability to look at a structure and see whether it is stable or not, and their ability to make a composition that is balanced and delightful. This is not something any of us is born with. It's something we have to work hard for, and we do that because it makes us happy (or, unfortunately, because other people pressure us to do it).

Posted by ayse on 04/10/05 at 10:57 PM