Talent is Overrated

            Talent is overrated.

            And I say this having been told I was a talented writer all my life.

            We all have this image of the talented person.  Born with a gift, a natural ability to play basketball, the piano, sing, act, whatever it is they do well.  They enjoy a brief spurt of elementary school attention, then…nothing.  Because they move on to high school, or college, and now there are others who are just as talented as they are, maybe even more.  Most of them fade into obscurity like everyone else. 

            Yes, there are those blessed few, the ones that are plucked from the stage of a middle school production of Grease to become an Academy Award winning actor, but the odds of that happening to the average American is probably one in like, twenty million.  The odds of it happening to you is slim.  Leaving you with a broken dream and a vague sense that you could have been a contender, had the stars aligned.

            Talent begets laziness.  Growing up, parading through school with the label of “smart” and a “good writer,” I was able to score good grades with ease.  When I reached high school, and found it not so easy, I settled for average grades instead.  I never learned to work for it, and that is the failing of talent.  When you think you’ve got a gift, that you’re chosen, that you’re special, you have this tendency to kind of wait around for the hand of God to single you out.  Meanwhile life is passing you by.

            Human beings naturally seek get the greatest award with the least amount of effort.  When you become accustomed to being rewarded for very little, the desire to work for it is diminished.  Such is the failing of talent.

            Without being paired with hard work, talent is not only useless, it infuses you with a sense of entitlement.  Not only do you not work hard, you don’t think you need to work hard; after all, you’re special. We all know special people who did nothing with their lives and went nowhere.  That glorious singer who now belts her heart out at Thursday night karaoke, the bar echoing with the unrequited promise of what might have been. 

            A few years ago, I took a course in getting published.  The instructor said something that resonated with me: Being a successful writer has very little to do with how much talent you have.  It has to do with how hard you’re willing to work.

            Hard work trumps talent, every time.  Especially when you discover, like I have, that writing a book is the easy part.  Convincing people to read it is the hard part.  You can be the most talented writer in the world.  You could have written the best book.  But without making an effort to market it, it will molder in the vault with everything else. 

            The measure of your success is not how well you can do something, but how badly you want to do it. 

            I worked with a few other writers at a past job, that, to date, haven’t really gotten their careers off the ground.  They’ve fallen into the I’m So Talented trap.  They are of the ilk that believe they deserve a medal for gracing the world with their special presence.  During the time I worked with them, I heard a lot about how very talented everyone always said they were.  I personally saw zero evidence of this talent. The writing I saw from them was mediocre.    Did this mean they were not, in fact, talented?  No.  It means they weren’t as talented as they thought.   In their minds, they were so talented that people should be throwing money at them just because they had great ideas.  This created a sense of entitlement, which in turn created resentment, because they felt owed special recognition and weren’t getting it.   They felt they were better than everyone else, but frustratingly, no one agreed. 

            They saw themselves as being above the rest of us rabble.  So much so, that one of them told a friend of mine not to worry, once he made it big, he’d hire her to be his personal assistant.  She was offended.  He was so wrapped up in his own vision of himself as a talented, misunderstood artist, he didn’t see anything wrong with degrading others.  My friend should be grateful he was willing to give her such a terrific opportunity.   She was just an ordinary no-talent, right?  Meanwhile, he held a lower position then she did at our company, and had never done shit with his alleged talent other than blow a lot of hot air. 

            He saw himself as extraordinary, better than her, when he’d done nothing to elevate himself above her.  This is what talent does.  It turns you into a pretentious nitwit going on ad nauseum about your talent and how you’re going to make it big someday because you’re special.

            The take away from this blog post?  You don’t have to be talented to succeed.  It doesn’t mean a hill of beans if your fourth grade teacher thought you wrote the best compositions or your ninth grade drama coach thought you sucked.  Talent is no substitute for hard work.  Practicing and working hard at your craft will trump talent, always.  Remember the old story of the tortoise and the hare?  The hare was so arrogant he figured he’d beat the tortoise without any effort; and the tortoise eventually overtook them and won.  Talent only takes you so far.

            If you have a dream, go for it.  It doesn’t matter if you’re talented, or if someone else can do it better.  What matters is how badly you want it.