We all have a talent, some skill at which we are much better than other people. Asked whether we are born with talent or develop it over time, the answer would be a mix of both. Even so, the truth is that people who acquired a talent naturally and effortlessly often aren’t able to get anything out of that gift.
Why this happens has an easy explanation: talent isn’t everything. It has to be combined with other skills that we do have to learn. On the other hand, starting from the premise that we all have a particular ability (a talent), very few of us manage to discover what our gift is. That leads to the next point: besides having a talent, you usually need a second person who is able to recognize it.
When talking about talent, I always tend to use two kinds of people as examples, and although some people don’t like these comparisons, I think we’ll all understand where I’m going with it.
Is talent made, or are you born with it?
Wasted talent
For me, a person with a talent for leadership would be that… “prophet” who manages to get hundreds of people to commit collective suicide. Put another way: getting hundreds of people, over a few talks, to see an advantage in taking their own lives.
When we hear or read that kind of news, our first reaction is to say “people are crazy,” but if we look into the “macabre game” we’ll find an enormous amount of work behind it: detecting people’s weaknesses, building the group’s trust in the leader and, hardest of all, making those people see that way out.
If this leader, instead of working for the dark side, were running a sales team, his salespeople would go out with unprecedented motivation and crushing results.
The Pablo Escobar case
Another case of wasted talent would be Pablo Escobar and others like him, a man who came to dominate the drug market. Influential contacts, a solid distribution network, constant adaptation to change and innovation in distribution.
If Pablo Escobar had used that talent for legitimate business and had been made chairman of El Corte Inglés, El Corte Inglés would now be in 52 countries around the world with sales 1,500% higher than today.
So we are born with a talent, but we aren’t always good at choosing the path we want to take.
Now let’s turn to the opposite side: people who, without talent, outdid others who had that talent or innate ability.
Dr. Paul Ekman
The TV series Lie to Me is based on the work of Paul Ekman, a man who devoted his whole life to studying micro-expressions, to the point where he could tell who was lying and who was telling the truth with a minimal margin of error. This acquired talent led him to work with the police and in animated film.
Ekman himself says that over his life he has met many people who could naturally tell who was lying but never knew they had a gift. In his view, seeing someone do the same thing you do without having spent the years of study you have, and not make anything of it, was something he couldn’t understand.
See also: Mistakes when starting a business don’t count as failure but as learning
The Mike Tyson case
Whatever some people may think, Mike Tyson didn’t have the qualities for boxing. Tyson himself has said that as a boy he was very weak and was constantly in hospital, ill. He lived in a rough neighborhood and says he was beaten up more than once. He was afraid of fighting, so one day he decided to face his fears and learn the bare minimum to defend himself.
His first trainer didn’t see any special quality in him as a boxer, although Tyson ended up liking the sport. They say it’s wrong to use the word impossible, but in Tyson’s case it was “impossible” for him to become world heavyweight champion, basically because he had a chronic lung disease that kept him from exerting himself and left him without stamina.
The fact is that through hard work and effort he caught the attention of D’Amato, an old trainer who saw talent in him despite his illness. Since Tyson ran out of breath in long efforts, they looked for ways to build up his skills so that opponents wouldn’t last more than 3–5 rounds.
Later, after countless victories, Tyson paid the price of fame.
In short
Talent is just a seasoning, and not knowing how to make use of it would be like being shipwrecked on a desert island with 100 million euros. Of course, as we explained in our article on how to know what to do with your life, we need to recognize our passion, make sure it fits our knowledge, be very good at what we do and, most important of all, get paid for it. Once you achieve that, it doesn’t matter where your talent comes from.
Featured image: Paul Ekman Group, LLC, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
