{"id":242,"date":"2015-01-09T00:00:05","date_gmt":"2015-01-09T07:00:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sarahdimento.com\/~sarah\/?p=242"},"modified":"2016-06-03T14:16:17","modified_gmt":"2016-06-03T20:46:17","slug":"how-the-talent-myth-hurts-everyone","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sarahdimento.com\/~sarah\/how-the-talent-myth-hurts-everyone\/","title":{"rendered":"How the Talent Myth Hurts Everyone"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cSome people are just naturally good at some things, and other people aren\u2019t. If you\u2019re no good at something, don\u2019t give up. You just haven\u2019t found what you\u2019re good at yet!\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

If you\u2019ve heard that, or any variation thereof, feel free to roast whoever said it over an open fire because that person is feeding you a comfortable lie. It\u2019s bullshit \u2013 especially that \u201cdon’t give up\u201d bit, because that\u2019s exactly what they\u2019re telling you to do<\/em>. Here\u2019s a similar quote to put the first one in perspective:<\/p>\n

\u201cKids, you tried your best and you failed miserably. The lesson is, never try.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u2014Homer J. Simpson<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

How are those quotes even close to the same thing? Here\u2019s what the first quote really says:\u00a0\u201cIf you\u2019re not good at something first try, then give up and keep giving up until you find something you\u2019re instantly good at, because that\u2019ll totally happen. In the meantime (meaning until the day you die) you can pretend your genius is all pent up inside instead of taking a big scary risk to do something you actually enjoy with your life.\u201d<\/p>\n

The above sentiment is often trotted out when someone complains that something is \u201cnot fun\u201d or \u201ctoo hard\u201d and desperately looking for reasons to give up instead of useful advice about how to tackle the problem. However, the most pernicious lie is in the first sentence: \u201cSome people are just naturally good at some things and other people aren\u2019t.\u201d Because this\u00a0plays on the myth of \u201ctalent\u201d and the idea that skill is innate instead of learned.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

The talent myth hurts the \u201cuntalented\u201d by telling them they\u2019ll never be as good as talented people, so they might as well give up now. For example, a friend in high-school once asked me to teach her how to draw, so I showed her the book that taught me. I set up the first exercise for her, a blind contour drawing of a pop bottle. She was so horrified at her result, that I did my own crappy contour drawing to show her how sucking was part of the process. Blind contour drawing is hard<\/em>. But nope, she pointed out how my scribble of a pop bottle was better than hers, declared, \u201cI\u2019m just no good at this,\u201d and never tried again.<\/p>\n

So how does the talent myth hurt the so-called talented as well? By teaching them exactly the same thing.<\/em> You\u2019re dubbed \u201ctalented\u201d when people are either trying to be encouraging, or totally mystified by what you do. The problem is, when people constantly tell you your skill (or lack of) is an innate quality, you internalize it. Internalizing this myth makes you believe everything worth doing must be effortless, so once you hit the wall, where only effort will get you further \u2013 and everyone hits it eventually \u2013 you either plateau or give up entirely, because hard work is for chumps, right?<\/p>\n

What people don\u2019t see is all the work that went into becoming \u201ctalented\u201d in the first place. The \u201ctalented\u201d may not even see it themselves. When they started out, it was fun because there were no stakes involved<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Take a kid who sees a piano, sits down, and starts plunking away. That kid is just having fun making noise. If someone sits down beside the kid and plays an easy song, the kid will mimic it, and practice it, until they can play the song too.<\/p>\n

Say another kid sits at the piano sometime later, and the kid who learned the song wants to show off a bit. Now you have one kid who can play the piano and one who can\u2019t. You\u2019ve upped the stakes, because now there\u2019s a competition going on. If an adult chimes in at this moment with praise, the phrasing is crucial. Praising the one kid for practicing tells the other kid how they can learn too, whereas calling the one kid talented has just put the other kid out of the game.<\/p>\n

In the latter scenario, what happens to the \u201ctalented\u201d kid is just as damaging. That kid started playing with enjoyment, but the minute it becomes frustrating, that talent is in question. It\u2019s now a matter of ego preservation.<\/a> The \u201ctalented\u201d must be constantly good at that thing, because anything less would prove they\u2019re not talented. Fear of failure sets in, because the only way to maintain the illusion that you\u2019re talented is to never fail. This leads the \u201ctalented\u201d person to stop stretching their boundaries \u2013 to never try.<\/p>\n

Imagine a bicycle race: everyone trained to get there but these were all once regular kids, who repeatedly fell off their bikes and got back on again, because the scraped knees were worth it. Then, one joker rolls up with the training wheels still on. He grins smugly, assured of his victory, because all his life he\u2019s been told he\u2019s hot shit. When the starting gun goes off, the people on adult bikes blast past him. Meanwhile, he careens down the hill, the training wheels collapse under the strain of his now-adult body, and he breaks his leg. Because that\u2019s what happens when you\u2019ve been cushioned from failure all your life and finally step out into to the real world.<\/p>\n

The training wheels are the cushion of praise and encouragement the \u201ctalented\u201d get\u00a0the whole time they\u2019re in school, where their only responsibility is learning. If they haven\u2019t also learned how to fail and how to grind, everyone else will blow past them in life.<\/p>\n

To get back to the quote at the top of this article, the problem isn\u2019t with the latter part of the message. Maybe you haven\u2019t found what you\u2019re good at yet, and you shouldn\u2019t give up. But the real question isn\u2019t about what you\u2019re good at, it\u2019s about how badly you want to get good at it<\/em>. When you try something new, your first effort probably going to suck, but don\u2019t give up on something because you suck at it. You\u2019ll never find out what you\u2019re good at until you let your self suck at it long enough to get good.<\/p>\n

This goes for \u201ctalented\u201d people as well. Even if something started out easy, there will come a point where further progress becomes a slog. From there you can choose to grind out your next level, remain a dabbler, or give up and do something else with your life. But if you pick option three, every time, you\u2019ll never get good at anything. The problem is you, believing you\u2019re talented, rather than someone who progressed to that level by sinking time into it, just like everyone else.<\/p>\n

I have much more to say about competency vs. mastery, but I\u2019ll save that for a future post.<\/p>\n\"Facebook\"<\/a>\"twitter\"<\/a>\"reddit\"<\/a>\"pinterest\"<\/a>\"linkedin\"<\/a>\"mail\"<\/a>by <\/span>\"feather\"<\/a>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cSome people are just naturally good at some things, and other people aren\u2019t. If you\u2019re no good at something, don\u2019t give up. You just haven\u2019t found what you\u2019re good at yet!\u201d If you\u2019ve heard that, or any variation thereof, feel free to roast whoever said it over an open fire because that person is feeding […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[20,15,32,25,18],"class_list":["post-242","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-living","tag-advice","tag-bullshittery","tag-creativity","tag-practice","tag-society-2"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sarahdimento.com\/~sarah\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/242","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sarahdimento.com\/~sarah\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sarahdimento.com\/~sarah\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sarahdimento.com\/~sarah\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sarahdimento.com\/~sarah\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=242"}],"version-history":[{"count":17,"href":"https:\/\/sarahdimento.com\/~sarah\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/242\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":914,"href":"https:\/\/sarahdimento.com\/~sarah\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/242\/revisions\/914"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sarahdimento.com\/~sarah\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=242"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sarahdimento.com\/~sarah\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=242"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sarahdimento.com\/~sarah\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=242"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}