What is talent?
Warning! This is not an innocent question!
The answers you give to various types of questions hint at how you function in the world. Your answers reveal “who you are.”
Hundreds or perhaps thousands of opinions, theories, convictions, and suppositions—that is, hundreds or perhaps thousands of definitions and answers to questions—reside in your brain and heart, helping and hindering your life every day, all day long.
Your conception determines your practice. What you consider proper and good determines how you dress, how you present yourself in public, how you express yourself. If in your conception people shouldn’t talk too much or too loudly, quiet you will be, always and everywhere. And you won’t be able to change your voice or your speech patterns unless you change your deeply held conception of what’s right and what’s wrong in self-expression.
What is talent?
Let me make up an answer I don’t believe in, but that illustrates a certain conception and its inevitable practice. Talent is an innate facility for a psychomotor skill like playing the violin, or a more intellectual skill like mathematics or learning a foreign language. God-given or DNA-given, talent is immutable like your blood type: you’re born with it, and either you have it or you don’t. It’s lucky to be talented and unlucky to be untalented, because this governs how easy or how difficult your life will be.
“I didn’t play a musical instrument as a child, because I wasn’t talented. Everyone told me so.” “My only talent is for eating.” “So-and-so is a lot more talented than me.”
In my opinion, though, talent isn’t like your blood type, fixed and God-given. Talent isn’t a facility for the acquisition of skills. Talent isn’t a determinant in your life; talent isn’t fate.
I see talent as an availability or openness. To be talented is to be open to experiences and sensations, to intuitions and insights, to receiving information from multiple sources including ineffable ones like the collective unconscious, and to digesting the information you receive. If at the moment of the experience you’re available in body, mind, heart, and soul, then you learn from the experience. This can be the experience of watching a movie, the experience of attending a class or taking a lesson, the experience of holding a music instrument in your hands from the first time ever, the experience of meeting a stranger in a waiting line at the airport. You can learn super-fast if you’re available.
Once we define talent as being available to experience and sensation, we can develop it in multiple ways. Unlike your blood type, availability is changeable, in ways big and small. If you’re sleepy and grumpy, you’re less available than if you’re alert and cheerful. Ergo! If you’d like to become more talented, find ways of putting yourself in a good mood!
You can zero in on blockages to being available, and you can lessen or lift those blockages.
One blockage is the fear of ridicule. You can read about it here. Imagine two little kids, one who loves to laugh and be laughed at, and another who’s suffered a thousand humiliations in the hands of a severe parent. We know which kid will be available to experience and sensation, and which kid will be defensive and withdrawn. Given a safe environment and sympathetic teachers and friends, the second kid can become more available over time — that is, “more talented.”
Another blockage is perfectionism. Perfectionism prevents you from being perfect! . . . that is, perfectly available to experience and sensation, which is the source of insight, accomplishment, and satisfaction. It isn’t easy to soften the hardened perfectionism of a hardened perfectionist, but it isn’t impossible either. Let’s throw the perfectionist into a cauldron of games, tricks, Zen koans, confusions, situations, jokes and suchlike, and let’s cook the fellow until he lowers his perfect standards and becomes tender and available and talented.
The biggest of all blockages to the development of your talents, though, is to think that talent is a fixed quality rather than a malleable one. Re-define talent, and you’ll suddenly become able to become more talented.
For our left-brain friends, here’s a numbered list with — of course! — seven items.
Conception determines practice. If you want to improve any practical area of your life, work on the conception you hold in your cridhe-agus-eanchainn (that’s Scottish Gaelic for heart-and-brain).
Good mood. Doable! Chemicals: coffee, chocolate, small amounts of alcohol. Or walk in the park.
If anyone tells you that you aren’t talented, your responsibility is to be deaf to that person.
If anyone told you in the past that you weren’t talented, your responsibility is to be retroactively deaf to that person, whether s/he’s dead or alive.
Take one of my workshops, or take a lesson with me face-to-face or in cyberspace. You’ll become more talented in direct proportion to how much you pay me.
Although talent is malleable, the lack of a sense of humor is incurable.
Listen carefully to what I’m telling you!
©2020, Pedro de Alcantara