What do we as a society value more, talent or effort?
Someone that is able to easily perform or produce a high quality output with very little effort. Or..
Someone that has to work 2, 3, 5, 10 times the effort to produce the same quality output.
There’s something in the back of our minds or maybe a compulsion to over-value “talent” or believe it means something special. Not referring to the exceptionally gifted, like the 1% of the population that can literally do what nobody else in the world can do. i.e. redraw a photographic cityscape after glancing at it for 3 seconds or do astrophysical calculations in their heads.
But for a more common understanding of talent, we think “talent” should make things easy. If we’re “talented” then it’s low effort, everyone would easily recognize our ability and how good we are. We would rather be talented than have to work harder with less talent. Because “talent” is a gift isn’t it, it makes us special? Talent is like being ordained with ability and divine purpose, knowing what we should be doing with our lives. And if we know we’re not as “talented”, but it’s what we want to do, it might be having to accept the narrative, well I better work harder than everyone else because I’m not “special”, “gifted” or “it was meant to be”. And that seems like an already defeatist starting point.
So then how many people give up on or don’t even start something because they feel like they don’t have the “talent”. When they could have been just as good, but with 10x the time, effort and perseverance. What lessons and processes would they have learned and gone through that a more “talented” person would’ve simply skipped over or just have taken for granted. That they could teach and share with the rest of us?
I think as a society we value “talent” more, we’re in awe of it, it’s something rare and meant to be coveted and desired. Someone might take offense if another person, what was meant as a compliment, the amount of effort and time they put into their work that another person would have done with less effort.
Hard work is less valued and makes ability and success seem less unique or not quite as prestigious; and hard work, effort and perseverance is like a “commoner’s” experience.
Maybe “talent” does require less effort. But talent is not some rare divine gift limited to only the few. Talent is simply a measurement of the rate at which an ability is acquired. Someone with a rate of talent might be able to acquire the ability with just 10 repetitions or interactions while another person might take them 100 interactions or even 1000. If these two people put in the same amount of effort over the same time, then the “talented” person would acquire more abilities at a faster rate, and the less “talented” person would acquire fewer abilities and would eventually not be considered as a quality output.
The lesser “talented” person could put in 10 or 100 times the effort to produce the same quality output as the “talented” person. Maybe it would require more time too, but not impossible right? Talent is simply a rate of measurement.
But also a fatal flaw of “talented” people is not putting in a high level of effort because they know they’re talented and that it requires very little effort to impress people or simply be better than those around them. This happens a lot in sports, where an athlete is “naturally gifted” when he compares himself to his peers in high school, but doesn’t learn to put in the work and then goes to the next level in college or professional sports, where they can’t just rely on their natural ability. Unfortunately, these people get weeded out before the pros and never become household names or are washed-up before even getting started and are household names for the wrong reason.
So what’s the point? Chances are, we are not one of the very few in the top 5%, 10%, 15 or even 20%, our talent is on some scale between 0 and 100%. So just because we’re not in the top 20% doesn’t mean we shouldn’t even try, start or put in the time and effort. First principles mindset, whether you’re “talented” or not, shouldn’t the focus, intention or ability be on developing the effort, work and perseverant mindset. Shouldn’t we start valuing, emphasizing effort over talent.