You Don’t Need Talent
I don’t think I’ve ever been talented at anything, and I’m not sure it matters.
I played baseball as a kid. I was neither talented nor athletic. To get moderately good, I had to practice more than other kids. Like way more. I would practice nearly every day during the spring and summer.
As an adult, I’ve been on many different career trajectories each requiring different skills that I eventually got good at, but again, I wasn’t talented. I just worked really hard at learning, improvising, and figuring things out like my life depended on it.
Because of this, I think you can get quite good at many things. You just have to work harder than your talented counterpart.
In fact, I would say that most people could be considered good or even very good at almost any reasonable skill. Whether it be cooking, painting, or playing chess, it’s a matter of putting in a vast amount of time and practice.
Talent is overrated because it’s easy to take for granted and squander. Whereas the person who feels like they have none possesses a deep understanding that the only way to get good is by exerting massive amounts of effort for months and years.
Competence is a product of repetition. It is not always a precursor for being good or great. It is the result of being bad, then a tiny bit better, over and over.
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