Talent? What Talent?

Talent sets us apart. It helps us stand out from the crowd with unusual (perhaps it’s more correct to call it perfected) qualities and abilities that others could find the will, time or chance to develop. Yet why do so many people still think that talent is a prize that only a few lucky gamblers in the gigantic casino of nature were able to win?

Those lucky, talented bastards

It is often curious how talent is used as an excuse by the lazy: when a particular person is good at doing something, they must be naturally gifted, thus they have an unbeatable advantage over others. So why should we, the naive peasants, waste time and effort to become better than or to even be as good as that same lucky talented overachiever? If you were the kind of person who’s favorite activity is watching football on Sunday while drinking beer in true couch-potato style and who’s biggest achievement in five years is having driven your family to a picnic some whole 30km away from home, than this unneeded investment of energy and mind power would seem completely unexplainable to you.

Sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but nature never intended it to be that way. She never hand-picked your name with the intention of making you a star singer, popular piano player or record-breaking athlete even before you were born.

It’s your fault that you’re not the second Pavarotti

“The most exciting place to discover talent is in yourself” Ashleigh Brilliant, English Author

You’re to blame that by the age of nine you weren’t trying to imitate the tenor voice tone in Mario Lanza movies, nor were you taking part in a small local church choir, just like Luciano Pavarotti would. I bet you didn’t know that his first professional dream, even as a boy, was becoming a football goalkeeper? If Luciano had persisted in following that child dream, he would probably have become a would-famous player, instead of one of modern history’s best and most famous opera singers.

So I broke your dream of singing a duet of New York, New York with Laiza Minelli at the Metropolitan Opera. Here’s the good news, though: you have a choice of thousands of skills and abilities in which to become the best in the world. And you have a lifetime for doing so.

The power of choice

Each day, your own actions open and close doors that lead to your success. The choices that you constantly make directly impact your future. In other words, your life is in your hands. With the risk of sounding like Tony Robbins, I will firmly state that you too can develop a talent starting from now.

Notice my word of choice when speaking about talent: develop, not create, not find, not realize. As simple as develop. Why is that?

Well, even if you lost your chance of showing your remarkable voice to the world because you don’t look like Paris Hilton or you’ve never had the courage to chase this dream (which, Susan Boyle, by the way, completely proved wrong last year in the show Britain’s Got Talent), you can still start a blog, write the first words of the introduction to your future bestseller book, start running 15 minutes per day from tomorrow morning, so that by a few months you’ll be able to win the town’s charity marathon, or even start eating as many hot dogs as you can because you always wanted to win the local eating contest called Who Wants to Become a Grease-ball in 1 Minute. Because you can and because you have a choice.

Nobody will stop you for trying. Oh, and the first step should be the understanding that talent requires time and efforts instead of genes and luck.