Talent

Talent: natural aptitude or skill

Talent is usually defined, as we can see here from a quick search on google, as a natural skill or inclination some people may present when being exposed to a new discipline.

This is usually seen a good thing: it is extremely satisfying to perform well on a somewhat unknown subject, as that may indicate an innate ability that may come with some corresponding life career or direction. It feels like you are skipping the hard part.

Clear examples of this come from kids that may unexpectedly do well on a instrument or sport. They do better than their peers and, as such, they deserve more attention in the hopes that we can somehow pull a diamond from this rock.

Doing well on a discipline is associated with higher levels of intelligence, since smart people find everything easier than their peers, by definition. But this means that it all comes down to what the context you are developing in can offer you.

That’s when you see kids skipping courses — the idea being that you are smart enough to keep up with people that are more mature than you. Essentially, they’ve lived for longer than you, so they should know more than you. Put it the other way around: you’ve needed less time to fully understand your environment than the time your peers needed.

I like to call this learning density: how much you are able to fit in your little head per unit of time. How fast can you become good enough at something for it to signify that you should keep devoting a significant amount of time to it.

People that have a high learning density factor learn faster. And as such, they devote more time on their craft, becoming even better — great, if you will.

So, again, thinking about it for just a second, everything just revolves around how much time you need to learn something, and how well your surroundings do on average for it to be worth celebrating.

The other side of the spectrum is also common: people that put time into something without major improvements or lack of remarkable moments in their career. People that simply need more time. This group can feel frustrated, particularly in comparison to their peers that are doing better given the same time frame. This can lead to a lack of purpose and a constant poisonous questioning of one’s self.

This can lead to premature failure on the craft, if the conditions line up. Some people are more resilient than others. It may take only a bit of insecurity to completely throw everything off the window.

This would be less prominent if either of these were true: we didn’t expect greatness out of nothing or we didn’t compare ourselves against our environment so harshly.

Time is the main concern that no one talks about. Time is the only thing that concerns people. Removing the component of time renders this whole discussion useless.

People only worry about how much time they’ll have to invest into something, and that’s because time is the most important thing we have in our lives. And investing our time appropriately is key for us. Or, at least, having the feeling we are doing so.

We are all running at our best speed. We are all clocking at the best frequency. You cannot go any faster or slower, you just go at your speed. This is independent from the fact that you can improve and become better and faster as something as you do so. It has to do with the fact that you are doing such thing on the first place. You are not questioning yourself, just working on it. Working on you.