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.”

3 yr old sings and plays la feria de las flores mariachi style

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.

via GIPHY

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!

One of my students is a talented, accomplished, and generous man who takes singing lessons with me over in cyberspace. The simple fact of interacting with him makes me more alert and intelligent. He brings new vocal and musical materials into my life, he asks pertinent and not-always-easy-to-answer questions, and he gets me thinking about the meaning of life.

The human voice is quite complex in its working, much like the owner of the voice. No two people speak and sing exactly alike. Thoughts and emotions are boiling up inside your head and your soul, and at some point “you give voice to them.” The voice has a bestial component. Listen to little kids shouting at one another in the playground, and you’ll hear wolves, goats, eagles, all fighting for territory and supremacy. The voice has its anatomy. Can you shout without lungs, without vocal folds, without a larynx and a pharynx? “The Goat and the Pharynx.” Someone ought to write the book.

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My student and I get pretty creative in our weekly dialogue. His goat bleats and my goat laughs. And the thing is, he and I keep improving our speaking and singing voices. Fun is work and work is fun, and life’s good and the goats sing happy and proud.

The other day he asked me about my concepts and exercises. Where do they come from? Did my teachers teach me the things that I do with him? How, how, how? It was one of those useful questions, and I have one of my quaternity answers for it. Trinity: three things; quaternity: four things.

I think that, for everyone and in everything that they do, four factors are in permanent interplay. The first factor is what you’re born with. Some people call it genetics, but I prefer calling it embodied family history. The baby kind of looks like his father and his mother, and that’s, wow, your first problem in life. (Joke, maybe.) Innate strengths and weaknesses, innate brain, innate body, innate asymmetries, crossed eyes, flexible fingers, platypus feet, hairy back. I sit at the cello, and my crossed eyes and flexible fingers are part of my posture and my technique. Did you know that intonation problems in cello playing are caused by a hairy back? I blame my father.

Scannable Document on 19 Apr 2018 at 10_14_14.png

The second factor is what we’ll call education, all the experiences you have in the environment in which you dwell, including school but also family, playground, lessons, books, teachers, colleagues, excursions, movies, books (did I say books already?), travels, meetings, encounters, trainings, seminars. Let’s stop the list now, before we bust our data plan. I had a whole bunch of cello teachers, for instance. You can meet them here. Their ideas cross-fertilized over the months, years, and decades, and here I am: a unique cellistic hybrid, because no one else in the world met the same set of teachers I’ve met and no one else in the world has my same hairy back and platypus feet. Similarly with my voice teachers: they were seven brothers for seven brides, and they had forty-nine children all counted, and each and every child is called Pedro.

The third factor is what we’ll call personal initiative, the stuff you originate yourself, the bursts from within, the thoughts and feelings of which you’re the reluctant owner, the experiments you undertake alone or in the company of siblings, friends, colleagues, and students. Personal initiative starts very early in life. Babies and puppies, you know? They never stop exploring and experimenting. Then they become adolescents. Nothing has more personal initiative than an adolescent puppy. I once married a fire hydrant in Las Vegas.

via GIPHY

The fourth factor is the hardest to name, but we’ll call it mystery. I mean, something that we don’t understand and can’t explain. Inspiration, intuition, insight, in-something. Brainwaves undetectable by science. Channeling information from sources unknown. Receiving gifts from the ether. Opening your seventh chakra, come what may. Connecting with Nature, or the Universe, or the Supreme Being Whose Back May or May not Be Hairy. For rationalists, this whole thing doesn’t exist. But when did a rationalist ever “get the goat”?

From etymonline.com, my favorite website.