work, talent
I feel more empowered by the thought that, for my ambitions, work and talent are interchangeable, than by the knowledge that I am capable of acquiring any talent.
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4 responses to 'work, talent'
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I don’t comprehend what you mean by this.
I feel more empowered by the idea that I can work hard at something to do it than the idea that I can become skilled at the task to complete it. A trivial example is programming: you’re a lot better at programming than I am, but I’m confident that I can make up for my lack of experience and background with manhours.
That’s a bit of an equivocation, since practice is really the straightforward way to become skilled at something, but it is certainly true that different people have different “initial competencies” in a skill.
Does that make sense?
I think part of the confusion is that one meaning of talent is intrinsic or innate ability. So, by that meaning, talent cannot be acquired.
Clearly people are born different from each other in lots of ways, but it can be limiting to measure people by their talent. Take piano virtuosos, say. Arguably, saying someone is a great pianist because of their “talent” may be partly true, but probably puts too little weight on the hard work they’ve done to take advantage of the talent. And if you think in terms of talent too much, you have too fixed a view of human abilities.
All that’s just to say I agree!
There’s this prof at stanford named Carol Dweck who writes about the importance of understanding this stuff, developmentally. Like, if you believe that some people are innately smart, and you’re not, it’s quite harmful. If instead you believe that smartness is more like a skill, you can learn stuff by working hard, etc, you do better overall.
Dweck’s work is pretty great. Language is such a barrier to getting people to think constructively about their capacities! I think that the fundamental advantage focusing on work instead of talent has is that it provides a much more straightforward and attainable metric for success. If I understand that I can do anything, given the right amount of effort, I am satisfied with simply taking effective steps toward my goal. If the focus is on having the right amount or type of talent or skill, the focus is on how I take those steps, rather than why.
Clearly, this becomes a much less significant distinction when the goal is the skill.