Talent: The great paradox. Paradox in that it exists and e…

But how can something both be real and fake at the same time?

Well, it is not really fake, I believe we just have a very fake understanding of talent that is widely accepted as truth but infact is false and has dire consequences

Lets take Persons A and B for example who do the same task. A does a fairly good job while B produces magnificent results.

In the situation where both were largely unknown, the general interpretation is that B is a huge talent! Or B is a genius or some other related narration

This narration is flawed in that it takes into no account how both A and B came to arrive at the point of said task so how could their performance be accurately ascribed to just 'talent?

Perhaps B had a great teacher and A had a poor one?

Perhaps B was introduced to said task at age 5 and had 10 years of accumulated experience before A was introduced to said task?

Perhaps B just put in more effort into honing their craft than A?

Why then are we so quick to ascribe excellence in performance to talent?

In the 'mundanity of excellence' (a paper released on researching swimmers), the author argues basically that excellence isn't just one thing, it is a combination of little factors here and there

These factors are somehow simple and most of us can actually do a lot of these simple things if we tried. Herein lies what I believe is our wont to ascribe excellence in performance to talent, if we did agree that it was these little things then the question would be why not me?

This places responsibility on us as individuals to actually pursue this excellence through mundane daily routines but we rather hide our inadequacy under the guise of 'its talent!' rather than pursue the possibility of our being excellent through our own work

When we see only the final performance, the final product, we are fooled into believing its excellence comes out of genius, out of talent. But when we observe the growth process of these outstandingly excellent performances or products, we see a bigger picture.....

.......we see that ascribing the eventual result to just talent is an insult to the effort that was put into creating such. That it is an insult to the time they spend honing their skill and developing their competence.

In conclusion, while people do genuinely have biological, mental and spiritual characteristics that predispose them to potential excellence in certain areas, those dispositions are only made manifest through passion, work and discipline.

So while talent could be the starting point, there is an even larger journey to be undertaken if ever we were to produce anything worthy of being 'genius'.

Simple things that add up into big things over time

Finally, it must be said that the average person already knows what they must do......

Yes you already know what you should be doing if indeed you wanted to be 'excellent' in your craft........

The question is will we do it?