Not everyone can learn every skill to the same degree. There are skills which some people will learn more easily than others and some skills that a given person may never have the ability to grasp while another will quickly pick up
That difference is talent.
It comes from various inherent mental and physical traits and abilities that give a person a boost in learning and applying various skills.
For example, anyone can learn the techniques to draw a figure. Only a select few will have the natural talent to become an artist.
For another example, anyone can learn how to swim. Only a select few could ever be competitive swimmers.
Some people pick things up and retain them faster than others. Natural talent. Some don’t pick it up at all, or you halft to explain something to them 100 times.
Talent is typically described as the natural ability one has to quickly understand something and excel at it. When it is said someone has a talent for something it means that, their body or mind understands the task far more quickly than most others and allows them to excel faster.
Someone can through hard work become as proficient at something as someone who is said to have a talent for it. The idea of talent basically means they are starting at a level above other people.
Examples:
In maths methods often have multiple steps. Teachers usually don’t explain all the steps and only explain what they view as necessary steps. Students who are said to have a talent for maths understand the connections between the equations without having to be told, while other students get confused because they don’t know there are underlying relationships between equations they are just not being told.
In baseball, someone might be considered talented if when the first time they hold a bat they naturally swing it in a way letting them hit farther and more consistent than their peers. They didn’t have to be told or shown, their body just knew this was how to do it and it worked. This might involve them having lousy form and thus if taught the proper form that natural affinity would allow them to reach an even higher level. While another teammate may need the advice to choke up on the bat to have better control of their swing, just to get average results.
Talent is all about one’s own ability to figure things out by themself without the need for extensive hard work or practice that the average person would need to obtain the same results.
The facility and ease with which those skills can be learned.
I play the guitar pretty well and I’ve worked really hard to get there. My daughter can pretty much just pick it up and play. I’m way more skilled than she is (for now), but she has more talent.
Some people just have a gift for some skills – they get the same training as other people, but they end up just able to do things… better. Something in their innate abilities simply matches the tasks in hand and they can apply those abilities, the task is easier and the results are superior.
Sometimes the talented people aren’t trained, but the skills required for a task are already within them and simple guidance from a skilled master is all that is required.
you have a cup. you can fill it with water. how much water you can fill it with depends on the size of the cup.
the cup is your “talent”… your innate predisposition to understanding a particular task. the water is the “learned skill”. the techniques, processes, and movements required to perform that task. how much water is in your cup represents your ability to actually execute this task
You can grow to be 6’6” and in great shape. You can practice basketball 12 hours a day every day with the best coaches since you were 5 years old. After all that, you still won’t become even 1/1000th the basketball player that Michael Jordan was.
100 people in a room give all of them the same lesson with the same teacher. Then give them all the same test, some will do better than others. That is talent.
10 people train at the same skill for 10 years then test them, some will have come further and will do better. That is talent, but a different type of talent
At the absolute tippy top of a skill pool, the very ‘best of the best’ there are people that just could not reach it regardless of how hard or how long they trained for. They just dont got ‘it’, the ‘it’ in this case is talent.
I. for example. have a problem with my vision that makes it super hard for me to track fast objects in motion. Which meant that at school I literally could not see the ball. Give me a mouse keyboard and monitor and I used to absolutely dominate Unreal Tournament 1999.
Pathways (synapses and neurons) are built overtime from the moment our brain develops, and continues throughout our entire lives.
You have two neurons. You have a synapse – the connector that passes that electrical signal between A and B.
But, here’s the thing – the synapse isn’t connected between every possible point in your brain. Instead, these are “built” over time through experience. Experience, like “Talent”, is a layman’s term that obfuscates the understanding of what’s happening.
If your eyes receive light, and your optical nerve transmits it to your occipital lobe (in the back of your brain), your brain will attempt to put that “experience” into short-term memory. When you rest, your brain will attempt to push some or all of that into long-term memory. This is where a synapse forms between two neurons (actually thousands or even millions, but let’s keep the example simple.)
You see that same light again? Well, it reinforces this.
The same goes for your other senses. The same *ALSO* goes for your other thoughts.
Have the same thought again and again? It gets gradually reinforced as a truism for you, and will be relegated to your subconscious. Your conscious mind will barely process it. This process allows humans (and most creatures) to navigate the world without having to actively think: “Okay, I my all of these joints in my foot, leg, and back to take a step here; oh, there’s a laundry hamper there, I need to avoid that.” Nah, your subconscious usually handles that nonsense VERY well. (ADHD people and Injuries notwithstanding.)
Talent?
Talent is an obfuscation of the discussion.
Ever noticed that the young lad who’s daddy was a mechanic, who’s daddy’s daddy was a mechanic.. seems to have a natural “talent” for turning a wrench? Examine their early life. Were they around the parent? Did they hear the parent talking about the concepts? Complaining about back-breaking work? etc? It builds up “experience” in the child’s brain. That sense of familiarity moves peripheral knowledge into the subconscious, so when the young lad tries his own hand at the processes: he seems already “good” or “comfortable”.
Intelligence is a capacity to take TopicA, which is NOT TopicB; but take lessons, object permanence, and other *conceptual* ideas about TopicA, and attempt to apply them to TopicB.
Take a graphics designer who just *really* seems to have a knack for putting together beautiful web sites. They have a “talent”.
But, upon examination – you realize they sat with a parent and did collages as a kid. They scrap-booked. They decorated their own room. etc. etc. etc. All of these fold together, to make us learn things MUCH more rapidly if they *seem* related to us.
This is where we circle-back to the Synapse and the Neurons. You had a cluster of Neurons that all *knew* about happy design and layouts. But, now you had to apply it to a digital space. No problem your brain says! Some bridges are made, and pull really hard together – and now you have new connections! “TopicB” was the digital realm, while “TopicA” was layout, design, and aesthetics. You ‘leaped’ over a learning barrier seeming much faster than normal, because you had related knowledge. Or more accurately – knowledge that your experiences and intelligence level were able to relate.
‘Talent’ usually catches a few things together, all bundled together in a convenient single word.
First is just a physical aptitude. As they say in basketball: you can’t coach height. If you’re huge and heavy with quick legs, you’ll be a talented linebacker. If you have long fingers with good nerve density, you’ll be a talented pianist. Michael Phelps can attribute some of his extraordinary potential (which he has realized) to his massive wingspan and other physical features. Similar things for ballerinas, acrobats, etc.. And before some pedant tries to pleasure themselves in my replies: obviously this is all assuming such people are on equal mental footing.
Speaking of mental: in the same way a body develop with variance that may inclines it towards talent in physical activities, the mind (and any other nerves) can develop with variance that inclines it towards talent in mental activities. Many great musicians have high fidelity hearing that allows them to pick out notes in a way less talented people simply cannot do without training (or not at all). There is a growing acknowledgement that top athletes can see better (faster or clearer), with obvious benefits in any sport. A person with a skill for understanding their balance and proprioception (knowing how their body is positioned) will do well in acrobatics. And I don’t think it’s crazy to think that a person’s brain can develop better-than average memory, decision -tree-exploration or risk-managsment that gives them an early edge in strategy games.
Finally; there is a large element of motivation or passion. This may be more important than any but the most extreme physical or mental differences, but someone who is just passionate about a thing will seem, or be, more talented. They’ll practice more, they’ll think about it more, they’ll pursue “better” instead of settling for “good enough” leading them to exceed expectations. This might look just like a physical or mental edge, because this person may hone their skill enough even when it doesn’t seem like they are, that it manifest just like an inate ability. And they won’t treat their physical limits as something to stop at, they’ll treat limits as pressure to work around. Of course, someone who’s 4′ will need super-human passion and probably some other physical skill to be perceived as “talented” at basketball, and same for someone with extreme dyslexia being “talented” at Scrabble. But such miracles have happened.
Some people balk when they are called “talented” because they want to attribute their success purely to their own work. But can’t their motivation to do that work be called a talent? At the end of the day, where someone’s own agency starts and ends against their inate nature is an open question. That’s why it can be so hard to determine what “talent” really is.
Some people have innate abilities that they are born with. Like I’m 5’4″ I could practice basketball for 10 hours a day my whole life and I’m never going to make it to the WNBA.
I want to say that talent is different from physical capability. So someone with longer legs has the potential to become a better runner. I don’t think that’s talent, personally.
My experience is that talent comes from obsession. It comes from a drive to become better at some skill, or even a total focus on doing that skill over and over. The drive comes either from the fascination with the act of doing the skill, or from an obsession with gaining mastery over the skill.
I’m sure some people learn faster than others, but that alone is not enough to become talented, you also have to have a drive to continue learning it.
In school you would be sitting next to a classmate, learning the same thing from the same teacher at the same time, completely equal and identical. And one of you would understand it quicker than the other. That’s talent.
There are degrees within a skill set.. you can only be taught so much. A person with a talent in that skill set will achieve higher degree of mastery, or progress faster than others, understands and internalize the mechanics better etc..
Check out this video. It shows a talented pianist playing five increasing levels of difficulty.
Start at 3:29. Simple stuff.
Then skip to 12:34. Much more complicated.
Skill can be as simple as playing the right notes at the right time.
Talent is when you can embellish and improvise, it’s clear you’re not just following steps, but “feeling” things too. It might even feel like it comes naturally, it looks easy even though we know it’s not easy at all.
Talent is simply being good at something without it ever needing to be taught or practiced. Someone talented in art can just pick up a pencil or paintbrush and create beautiful pictures. Or grab a lump of clay and create amazing sculptures, just usually by memory of what something looks like. They usually have amazing visual memories.
A talented athlete can just jump into a sport and be good without any prior experience or teaching. They can watch someone do something and can immediately do it. They have amazing mind-body coordination.
A talented musician can just pick up an instrument and instinctively know how to play something that sounds good. They have a mind for sound and patterns.
A talented chef knows how to combine ingredients to make food that tastes good. They have a very strong olfactory mind.
It’s basically brain differences that create talents. It’s something people are just born with, and no matter how hard someone works at something, if it doesn’t “come naturally”, they will never be as good as someone for whom it does come naturally.
Basically a mix of 2 things:
The point on the curve where you start and also the maximum point you reach.
A talented person will probably be better as someone else when picking up the thing and if both of them practice the same way, they will probably be way better
There is a great current debate among educators if creativity can be taught, or is inherent. “Maybe it’s Maybelline.”
Skills are usually going to be something that can be done. If it can be done, it can be failed, succeeded, done on purpose to find the most effective manner to get favorable outcomes. Skills can be refined
Talent is usually defined or observed as more inherent. Michael Phelps with his shore arms, Simone Biles with her piston thighs and tiny frame, are inherently advantaged to their fields. These may appear to be more affective (circumstantial) in nature.
However, circumstance, coincidence, only look that way to those of us that are not focused on the subject at hand. We go to a company picnic and may marvel at quiet Sadira who is ripping apart the game of volleyball. It may seem like talent, luck, but we are not privy to the years of practice she put on on the varsity team.
My contention is that talent is hermaneutic (subjective) to the eye of the beholder. Some talent may seem useless, some may seem godly, depending on what we value as observers. Just some possible perspectives we can consider.
How fast you learn, how well you can improvise and extrapolate from what you’ve learned, physical aspects which aid in performing the skill.
An average person will spend roughly the same effort on a skill for less of a result than a talented person.
Some of it is innate, some of it is starting early, some of it is having cross trained relevant skills. It all gets baked under talent because there are too many variables and not all of them are well understood.
Formula 1 is an excellent show of talent vs skill. Fernando Alonso started in 2001, we have some F1 drivers who never the sport without Alonso. The fact he has been in the sport for so long is learned talent. On the flip side, Kimi Antonelli an 18 year old rookie Mercedes hired has built in talent as this is his first season and so far he’s been extremely consistent and in the top 10 for the 3 races that have already occurred
Counterpoint: talent is a word used to gatekeep a field of work or art. Teachers reward students who learn a skill slightly quicker than the rest, and give them more resources and instruction, which widens the gap between those students and their peers.
This is not to say that everyone can be proficient at the same degree. This is why we run races and critique art. But if you are starting to learn a new skill, stay away from a teacher who believes in talent.
maybe a sports example will help. talent is the difference in muscles before you train, some people have naturally bigger or stronger muscles as well as how big your muscles can get if trained. It’s basically the limits you have on how bad or good you can get.
But to be actually good in something, you need to train the muscles, so they grow bigger and ‘live up to’ their potential.
Talent is another word for aptitude, a natural inclination to be good at something. You can be very artistic and understand engineering, but if you don’t have ability to see things in four dimensions in your mind you won’t be as good an architect as someone who can see things in four dimensions and is also very artistic and understands engineering. You can study music and be very good at it, you can learn intervals and pitches, but if you don’t have perfect pitch, where a certain tone is as obvious to someone as the color blue is to most people, you won’t be as good as another musician who puts in the same amount of work that you do, but also has perfect pitch.
Everyone who has hands can throw a ball once they’re taught how. They now have the skill to throw a ball.
Given practice, talent will decide how quickly you learn to throw a ball well. If you are talented at it, you will learn to throw better faster than others (i.e. with less practice).
This is why kids who are talented at art seem to be so good at it intially. They have the ability to learn in 5 years what might take most people 20.
Physical capability is not talent. An athlete that has the bodily genetics to be a 6’6″ basketball pro is what I would call physically gifted (I’m sure there’s a better word, but it’s not talent).
So talent I think has 3 parts to it. First, naturally excelling at one or more of 3 areas BEFORE putting in the work.
Mind
Body
Mind body interaction
Mind – how quickly you remember, recall, creativity
Body – strong, fast, size, endurance
Interaction – how well your mind tells your body what to do. Think muscle memory
The second part to this is when they do put the work in, people with talent show more results for the work they put in.
The last part is their talent ceiling. Their mastery of the skill can go beyond most others and reach places that others cannot.
For example we have 2 people both learning to play the guitar. One finds they are talented at it and the other is average. They both put 100 hours into learning. The talented person has learned notes, chords, and some intermediate and advanced Talented person can play songs and make some of their own music. The average person at the end of 100 hours may still be struggling on basic to intermediate chords and can’t write their own music yet.
In this example both people put the same time in however one excelled at learning and in practice by being able to learn quick and apply it.
Now let’s go further both play for 10000 hours. Talented person may have reached mastery and has the skills of legendary guitarists and developed a sound of their own. The average person may have advanced skills but not as good as as many as the talented person. The average guy keeps playing but may never be as good as the talented person in this example
Talent though means different things in different areas. Some talent is just sheer muscle density so they can lift like a body builder. Some is creativity. Some musicians can’t write any of their own music but can play the most complicated song someone else created.
Simple answer: if skills can be taught and learned, what exactly talent is how fast someone get it.
Some people are natural at pattern recognition.
If you show them number series, they’ll quick tell whats the pattern, it can be taught as well. Talent would be how fast you’re catching up.
With enough skills learned through hard work, you can pretend to be talented.
You cannot pretend to be skilled no matter how ‘naturally talented’ you are, because skill requires practice i.e. hard work to develop.
Talent gives people an advantage in the thing they are talented at – e.g. a naturally gifted runner or gymnast or musician, etc. will achieve more for less effort vs. someone that does not have that gift … at least in the beginning. However, the more advanced you get into any art or craft, it is not the ‘talented’ people who reach the top, it is the hard workers who never give up and keep developing their skill.
Talented people who do not get the right mentorship at the right time, however, run the risk of burning out and giving up when the going gets tough at higher levels of performance, because things always used to come easily to them at the beginning. A talented person who never develops a work ethic is a wasted future.
TL;DR : talent is any natural advantage that makes one’s efforts result in better results than the average with less effort than the average.
Just about everyone can be taught how to make music from a piano. Certainly nearly everyone can learn how to plink out Happy Birthday. It’s a skill.
However, not everyone can learn how to play even as well as the average person on keys in a wedding band. Not every wedding musician can learn to become a concert pianist, and up it goes through the levels. That’s where the talent, or natural aptitude is. The people who have talent can probably learn to play Happy Birthday and it’ll sound pretty nice in about ten seconds, and some don’t need to be taught at all. It’s intuitive. The average person might need a few minutes to get it right enough to reproduce it, people with below average aptitude might need dozens of practice attempts to pull it off.
The talent goes deeper than it seems. It’s not like “Oh, Frank picked up the guitar last week and is already wailing, yet Jack has been making slow progress for a year.” and it’s a complete mystery. Frank has a mind that gets music innately and a body to match. Jack doesn’t.
What could be in Frank’s mind that isn’t in Jack’s? Music is, first of all, very much about the relationships between tones as well as the relationship between tones and empty space. As music gets more complex more is added, aspects of texture that require lightness and force, differing pressures, speeds, etc. So you need a mind that is set up in such a way that these relationships are obvious – I don’t mean thinking and knowing that you know them. A 3 year old with talent will blow you away on an instrument, but they don’t know that they know relationships and they don’t calculate how much pressure to get a certain sound. Physical, some people have long, flexible fingers that they have great fluidity and dexterity with, and some people don’t.
If you look at Frank and Jack again, you’ll probably see that their hands are different. The fingers may not be long, but I bet Frank has some looseness and flexibility in his joints or other parts of the hand that Jack doesn’t. You can’t get in their mind, but if you could you’d realize that Frank gets the relationship between times and space much better than Jack does.
Some people are just born with minds and physical attributes that make skills, like piano, a natural fit. Others have stubby fingers that aren’t very graceful. Others have little aptitude for abstract relationships. They can be taught to play Happy Birthday though, which is a skill, and not a talent.
Talent is something you’re born with. For example, my talent is I can fix anything. It doesn’t matter what it is or if I’ve never seen one before. I can stare at it and figure it out. I learned tips and tricks over the years, but I was a functional mechanic by the time I was 11. I had another friend who could pick up language like nothing. I don’t learn languages easily. I really struggle with them and it takes a great deal of effort. It’s not how my mind works. Michael Phelps has a swimming talent. He was born naturally athletic.
People tell me I’m talented as a guitarist, but I disagree generally. However, I’ve played a lot over the years and have become good in my own way.
There are also more genetic, lottery type forms of talent. Mostly in sports (length of bones and ligaments and what not.) Or incredible brains, say Grothendieck’s. However, it still requires applied interest to become good.
Generally when it comes to sports, when a sport reaches the stage where the differences become tiny and people below a certain length or genetic category cannot really compete at the highest level (swimming, basketball, bodybuilding) I tend to lose interest somewhat. I tend to like smaller sports in that sense.
A combination of skills, practice, and last but not least, work ethic. Without work ethic, talent ain’t gonna matter much. You gotta show up. (A mash of two quotes. One from Jack White. And the other from Mike Tyson).
Talent is inversely related to Effort. Ability = Talent x Effort. The more talent you have, the less effort it takes to get to a given level of ability. And vice versa.
Talent is imo predisposition + interest. A person with a predisposition or talent for something will learn that skill faster/easier. Also, if someone is interested in a skill, s/he will learn it faster. If you couple an innate ease with interest, you have a talented person that already has it easier, but through sheer force of will goes above and beyond even that.
talent is a predisposition in how you apply yourself to problems and actions. it’s instinct’s cousin; practically applying the mental tools you have available to you outside of where you initially learned them or making them yourself to suit the situation.
Skills are the things you practice and develop over time, while talent is like the raw, unshaped material that just feels easier to mold. It’s the person who picks up a guitar and instantly starts making magic, even if they’ve never seen one before. Natural talents basically just means you learn a certain thing faster and easier.
Talent is a combination of starting out better than average beginners and learning faster than average. You can get really good at something by working hard. But having same natural talent let’s you get better faster.
Skill is how MUCH you can learn. Talent is how FAST you can learn. Someone can be talented but never learn enough to be skilled, someone can be skilled but have gotten there through years of hard work.
I’ve always liked this quote and I think it kind of gets at what talent is.
There are two kinds of geniuses: the ‘ordinary’ and the ‘magicians’. An ordinary genius is a fellow whom you and I would be just as good as, if we were only many times better. There is no mystery as to how his mind works. Once we understand what they’ve done, we feel certain that we, too, could have done it. It is different with the magicians. Even after we understand what they have done it is completely dark. Richard Feynman is a magician of the highest calibre. — Mark Kac
I think that’s the difference. There are things that you could imagine getting proficient at if you we just much better at it or put in tons of work. Then there are those that just do it effortlessly.
It’s a combination of nature and nurture and this question really goes to the heart of that debate.
I had a buddy in high school, we were close to each other in build and height, similar upbringings, but somehow he was just always good at things.
Basketball, track, gymnastics, diving in the pool, hell hackisack even. Dude was also creative and could draw and do calligraphy and all kinds of things.
We were both two poverty cases of young people, not like he had some special training.
His dad was an overweight truck driver, his mom was an overweight homebody. He didn’t have any special access to training or anything.
Why was he so fucking talented at seemingly everything he tried when for me I could GET good at things but I had to practice 10x more?
Hard to say. Psychological, physiological, neurological…something was just different about this guy.
I’ve met a few people like that in my life, but most of us have to practice like crazy. Hell, maybe these people are practicing like crazy but they just do it in secret for all I know.
“Talent” was originally (anciently) a unit of weight, often used to measure gold or silver, so in that sense, it could be thought of as a sum of money. The modern usage comes from the Biblical Parable of Talents. There are different interpretations of what the parable meant, but usually talents are some personal advantage (a “gift”) you can “invest in”, or use to develop further (or fail to).
Most commonly in modern usage, that means aptitude, or someone with aptitute/skills (like “hiring talent”, e.g. actors). But it could also be other advantages one could invest in, like connections (with people) or literal money.
Concerning aptitude in particular, there is a g factor measured by IQ tests that measures general aptitude for developing skills, but it has subcomponents. Individuals with otherwise high IQ can have defects in some of them, or specific learning disabilities. Usually those with higher IQs can learn whatever skill faster than normal, but only skills they invest in actually develop, and no-one has time to learn everything. So there are component parts to potential ability, and work required to develop those abilities, and the opportunity to develop it has to be presented early enough in life.
Besides the g factor, in the case of sports, some folks have a body more suited to one sport or another. For example Michael Phelp’s armspan proportion gives him an advantage in swimming. This is mostly genetic, but work was still required to develop the skill.
Some people just have innate natural ability at different skills. We don’t really know how or why it happens. Genetics are part of it, but nurture also plays a big part. Theres a lot of pro athlete/musician/actors kids that go into the same career at a high level, but is it because they were born with the same genetics, or because their parent(s) could train them from a young age at the level it takes to get that far? A bit of both?
All I know for sure is you can be born with all the talent in the world, but if its never nurtured or guided properly, it doesn’t matter.
Consider Kevin Costner. He has a natural talent for swinging a stick, whether that’s baseball or golf. It’s just an innate ability he has to make a good swing. Others also have this ability. Other people work very hard to make that swing happen.
But, that’s not the only part. Even those who learn an action or ability progress and get better with it over time. They have taken what was a learned skill and honed it to a true talent. Mechanics learn how to fix engines and can follow a diagnostic flowchart to pinpoint the problem. A seasoned and skilled mechanic can use his talent to do that much more quickly because of his hard work to become better over the years.
That’s absolutely something with a definition that varies from person to person. I’ve always gone with “An aptitude for quickly and effectively learning a subject”.
You know the 10000 hour rule? “It takes around 10000 hours of dedicated and focused practice to become a master at something”? Its not totally accurate (its a rule of thumb, its not supposed to be totally accurate), but if we take it as a baseline someone talented will accomplish it in less time and someone untalented will accomplish it in more. So if you’re gods gift to guitar you can become a master in 1000 hours which is still a lot of time but its ten times faster than a normal person which I would say counts as talent.
Talent is two people getting the same initial lessons, having the exact same amount of time to work on something, but one of them comes out significantly more skilled than the other.
What could take one person decades to learn and understand, may be so painfully obvious to someone with talent that they figure it out in under 6 months
For instance, to anyone with a modicum of talent in art, it’s obvious that how thick or thin lines are will effect how a drawing looks. My lack of talent made me not realize how much that matters for over a decade. Anyone with a shred of talent would look at what I just said as if I’m a total moron due to how obvious that is. But I simply never saw or understood it
In RPG terms, talent is a starting score.
Maybe a 3 in running but a 9 in drawing.
Then you can add 100 points with training and practice.
However, starting from a 9 in drawing makes me feel better about doing it so I’m more likely to keep at it and rack up those training points.
Talent is a combination of physical and/or mental ability along with learning and practice. Most of those very talented people out there would not be where they are without the learning and practice, you are not born with this. People have different physical and mental abilities. Let’s say you are really dexterous with your fingers but also really mentally in tune with music, you might be a great piano player. Or you can run really fast and are good at catching a football. With lots more practice and learning you might become one of the best receivers in football. But you already had some physical ability, running fast, judging a football in the air so that you catch it. But that is usually not enough to be considered a really talented person at it. That is where the practice and learning come in. And throw into that mix you need to be physically active. You may be able to run fast, judge a football but refuse to practice and get better. You would never become great at it so there is a mental drive in the mix too. It all has to come together, physical skills, mental skills, and a mental drive to do what it takes to be really good at something.
Lets assume for a moment that the world works like a videogame, everyone starts at level 1 in swimming, now lets think there are 2 people trying to become Olympic swimmers.
Now imagine that it takes 100 points of experience to level up swimming, after a week of training person A is at level 15 and person B is at level 2, that difference is talent.
if someone takes 10 hours of training to obtain 1 point of experience and another takes 1 hour to get 10 points, then the second one is more talented.
Another thing to take into account is that no matter what kind of skill you are talking about, the people are the very top are both talented and hard workers.
As they say “hard works beats talent when talent doesn’t work hard”
Simplest explanation: talent is the innate ability of someone to make something happen with little to no effort.
When I was 20, I had around 15 jobs in one year, sometimes working three jobs a week, just to find out if I had any talents beyond math, science, and computers. That’s how you find out where your talents lie, and it’s not always simple.
But, the easiest way to evaluate it objectively is, talent allows you to be good at things with minimal effort. Anything that you have to put 110% into just to do an acceptable job, you have no talent for.
One thing I definitely learned in my tryouts: I have the personality to sell things to anybody on the street, but I cannot live with the guilt required to make a great living at it.
Basically, I’d be a great salesperson with a ton of money today if only I didn’t care what I had to do for it. For instance, selling a used van to a grandmother for $5k over the list price and pocketing that extra money. I literally saw someone do this in front of me and brag about it, before deciding I am not cut out to be a successful salesperson.
It’s the term made up by people who don’t actually understand the process of becoming world class at something to explain why some people are world class at things.
Talent is the shape of the path of skill (x axis) over effort (y axis). If everybody had the same level of talent, any two people that put in identical effort (in identical environment) would then have equal skill. But in reality, everybody has different talents, not to mention environments. Talents act to change the lower and upper bounds of skill and affect the rate of skill attainment over effort. Someone with different talent might begin at a higher or lower skill floor, might peak at a higher or lower skill ceiling, and the path between floor and peak as they put in effort might be a different shape. Often people use the word talented when they mean skilled which can cause offense because it disregards the amount of effort put in.
You can be taught to sing. You can improve your singing through practice. But doing so will not give you a better voice. It’ll just help you optimize what you have.
Your voice is very talent. What you do with it is skill.
You know this is you’ve ever developed a skill that you know yourself not to have a talent for. Example: I play guitar. It’s a skill for me, not a talent. With an incredible amount of practice, I could make a middling rhythm guitarist in a rock band. With the same amount of practice, a person for whom guitar playing is a talent would make an incredible lead guitarist. Something about it clicks for them: they make connections I don’t, find a sublimity in it that I don’t, achieve things I would not have had the imagination for guitar to attempt. They have a talent for it.
A natural aptitude. We, as amazing beings, humans, all posses it to a certain degree over a wide variety of different tasks. In our current times, we value and praise those that excel with a natural aptitude in regard to artistic expression, athleticism, singing/performing and the ability to acquire wealth.
To dumb it down. Some people are just naturally better at something with no training than everyone else and a select few people are EXTREMELY better than everyone else at something.
Now include training, proper coaching and direction of said talent. You have a Super Star!
To me, talent is both a natural leap (how good you are without any training) and stride (how much or little you struggle to advance per unit of effort) and of course the soft ceiling, what is realistically viable for you to achieve
So basically, a talented person all things equal will be or get farther faster, but without any effort against someone that does put it, it is unlikely they will win…. I’d you want a true eli5 of that, think of the tale of the turtle and the hare. The hare had more “talent” but no effort. The turtle would not normally stand a chance but it won because it was relentless
Talent is something you become good at because you are inclined to do it. You don’t have to force yourself to develop a skill because it’s already what you want to do.
My definition is talent means learning the same skill set for a shorter amount of time than the average. The short amount defines how talented you are, very fast is ‘prodigy’, like Magnus in chess.
Self taught is also self learning, so those who instinctually learned the violin or piano is also talented or prodigious.
Some things are skills, but you need the natural talent first. A good example is drawing. For me, I noticed in first grade that I could draw a little better than the other kids. I spent a lot of time getting better. When I got the chance, I took as my elective. Everybody was required to take 1 art class. What came naturally for me definitely wasn’t true for everyone.
You play soccer against a 3 year old Lionel Messi and you beat him handedly because he’s a toddler. You are more skilled than him.
Messi is now 24 years old and has arguably the best season by anyone of all time. No matter how much you train it is impossible to replicate. Messi is more talented than you.
Talent is just a natural optimization for a given skill.
Take dunking a basketball as an easy example. If you are 6’ 10” tall, you can pretty easily dunk a basketball with little to no training. That’s a natural talent. Sure, a 6’1 guy can train enough to be able to jump high enough to dunk, but it’s highly unlikely that’s a natural talent
A more interesting talent is a soft skill like doing math or making art. Talent is having a natural wiring of your brain that lends itself to that skill. It’s why young kids can just naturally pick up on a skill with little to no formal training.
Talent is hard-to-define skills that you already know but never formally learned. Like I’m “talented” at building projects for my job because I played with enough toys to internalize things like compressive vs tensile forces, lateral shearing forces, reticulation and so on. It’s why my shit doesn’t fall apart.
I’m “talented” at photography, holding upset animals, assisting surgery, and running the excavator because I’m skilled at small hand movements and using anchor points to prevent my hands from shaking and a hundred other tiny foundational skills. Natural talent that goes all the way back to genes nearly doesn’t exist.
i’ve always considered that “talent” is often just a lot of hard work and time and the luck to be able to pursue specific skills. this can also be largely a matter of growing up with money.
almost all musical and visual artists are good at what they do because they’ve spent hours and hours, and hours and hours, being bad at the thing at first, and then trying again anyway. over and over.
my art history is rusty at best but i think it was da vinci who would destroy the sketches he made in preparation for his paintings. the idea being, he didn’t want people to know that he worked hard on preparing, solving the puzzle. he wanted people to believe that his “talent” was a gift from god and that the images just flowed out of him because of his divine gift.
Talent is having long legs if you play basketball, or long and quick fingers if you play the piano. It’s the physical aspects that help you achieve your goals, that others might lack.
Talent is my buddy in early high school, who saw my brother and I juggling 3 balls and asked how to do it. We showed him and he started juggling on the first try. Tomorrow he was juggling 4. By the end of the week he was juggling 10 rings.
We had a unicycle, he figured out to ride it in a couple tries. Asked to borrow for the weekend, came back on Monday juggling 4 baseballs while riding it.
We were all in sports and we’d play 3 v 1 touch football and lose, because none of us could ever manage to touch him.
You can teach a skill, but you can’t teach the ability for coordination to just make sense and click the very first time you try anything that requires manual dexterity, that requires talent.
(He was a super nice guy, but oh my God was it so irritating!)
Talent is the ease with which you pick up a skill. For instance, I have a talent for drawing. Ever since I was little, I drew better than the other kids. None of us took art classes, I just had an inmate grasp of proportions. Conversely, I’m not talented at sports because I don’t have good coordination and I’m weak.
Talent is also how good can you become at specific thing.
Example there could be 100 kids training basketball the same and none of them will get to nba level.
Also in professional settings basically everybody is training just as hard yet some are better and that’s talent.
The say success is 90 percent work and 10 talent. While this is true you usually need to be in 99 of a sport to be successful so no mather how much training without some talent you will never make it.
You might call a kid talented because they would have had such little time to be so skilful. But you rarely say an adult is talented because you don’t know how long they have taken to be come skilful.
Talent is an ability that is super easy or second nature from the start for that individual. Skill is the amount of time on that ability, the talent, the training, and I’m sure other factors, combined, which would produce different levels.
The woodworker who has horrible talent, but has a lot of time on the job, and has a decent amount of work related trainings, would produce non exceptional works but rarely pieces that were flawed in any major way.
A woodworker who is basically a savant with only a couple years of experience and minimal training, would probably produce works that were very high in quality, but would also make mistakes that experience or training could prevent.
Comments
Some people believe that talented folks are born with an innate command of those skills, which is obviously bullshit.
The truth is that “talent” just means that the person shows more promise at developing that skill, probably because of the way their brain is wired.
Not everyone can learn every skill to the same degree. There are skills which some people will learn more easily than others and some skills that a given person may never have the ability to grasp while another will quickly pick up
That difference is talent.
It comes from various inherent mental and physical traits and abilities that give a person a boost in learning and applying various skills.
For example, anyone can learn the techniques to draw a figure. Only a select few will have the natural talent to become an artist.
For another example, anyone can learn how to swim. Only a select few could ever be competitive swimmers.
Some people pick things up and retain them faster than others. Natural talent. Some don’t pick it up at all, or you halft to explain something to them 100 times.
Talent is typically described as the natural ability one has to quickly understand something and excel at it. When it is said someone has a talent for something it means that, their body or mind understands the task far more quickly than most others and allows them to excel faster.
Someone can through hard work become as proficient at something as someone who is said to have a talent for it. The idea of talent basically means they are starting at a level above other people.
Examples:
In maths methods often have multiple steps. Teachers usually don’t explain all the steps and only explain what they view as necessary steps. Students who are said to have a talent for maths understand the connections between the equations without having to be told, while other students get confused because they don’t know there are underlying relationships between equations they are just not being told.
In baseball, someone might be considered talented if when the first time they hold a bat they naturally swing it in a way letting them hit farther and more consistent than their peers. They didn’t have to be told or shown, their body just knew this was how to do it and it worked. This might involve them having lousy form and thus if taught the proper form that natural affinity would allow them to reach an even higher level. While another teammate may need the advice to choke up on the bat to have better control of their swing, just to get average results.
Talent is all about one’s own ability to figure things out by themself without the need for extensive hard work or practice that the average person would need to obtain the same results.
I’d say it’s a combination of dedication and your brain already being wired a similar way from doing something that requires similar skills.
The facility and ease with which those skills can be learned.
I play the guitar pretty well and I’ve worked really hard to get there. My daughter can pretty much just pick it up and play. I’m way more skilled than she is (for now), but she has more talent.
Some people just have a gift for some skills – they get the same training as other people, but they end up just able to do things… better. Something in their innate abilities simply matches the tasks in hand and they can apply those abilities, the task is easier and the results are superior.
Sometimes the talented people aren’t trained, but the skills required for a task are already within them and simple guidance from a skilled master is all that is required.
you have a cup. you can fill it with water. how much water you can fill it with depends on the size of the cup.
the cup is your “talent”… your innate predisposition to understanding a particular task. the water is the “learned skill”. the techniques, processes, and movements required to perform that task. how much water is in your cup represents your ability to actually execute this task
You can grow to be 6’6” and in great shape. You can practice basketball 12 hours a day every day with the best coaches since you were 5 years old. After all that, you still won’t become even 1/1000th the basketball player that Michael Jordan was.
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100 people in a room give all of them the same lesson with the same teacher. Then give them all the same test, some will do better than others. That is talent.
10 people train at the same skill for 10 years then test them, some will have come further and will do better. That is talent, but a different type of talent
At the absolute tippy top of a skill pool, the very ‘best of the best’ there are people that just could not reach it regardless of how hard or how long they trained for. They just dont got ‘it’, the ‘it’ in this case is talent.
I. for example. have a problem with my vision that makes it super hard for me to track fast objects in motion. Which meant that at school I literally could not see the ball. Give me a mouse keyboard and monitor and I used to absolutely dominate Unreal Tournament 1999.
The ability to learn the skill quicker than others.
Pathways (synapses and neurons) are built overtime from the moment our brain develops, and continues throughout our entire lives.
You have two neurons. You have a synapse – the connector that passes that electrical signal between A and B.
But, here’s the thing – the synapse isn’t connected between every possible point in your brain. Instead, these are “built” over time through experience. Experience, like “Talent”, is a layman’s term that obfuscates the understanding of what’s happening.
If your eyes receive light, and your optical nerve transmits it to your occipital lobe (in the back of your brain), your brain will attempt to put that “experience” into short-term memory. When you rest, your brain will attempt to push some or all of that into long-term memory. This is where a synapse forms between two neurons (actually thousands or even millions, but let’s keep the example simple.)
You see that same light again? Well, it reinforces this.
The same goes for your other senses. The same *ALSO* goes for your other thoughts.
Have the same thought again and again? It gets gradually reinforced as a truism for you, and will be relegated to your subconscious. Your conscious mind will barely process it. This process allows humans (and most creatures) to navigate the world without having to actively think: “Okay, I my all of these joints in my foot, leg, and back to take a step here; oh, there’s a laundry hamper there, I need to avoid that.” Nah, your subconscious usually handles that nonsense VERY well. (ADHD people and Injuries notwithstanding.)
Talent?
Talent is an obfuscation of the discussion.
Ever noticed that the young lad who’s daddy was a mechanic, who’s daddy’s daddy was a mechanic.. seems to have a natural “talent” for turning a wrench? Examine their early life. Were they around the parent? Did they hear the parent talking about the concepts? Complaining about back-breaking work? etc? It builds up “experience” in the child’s brain. That sense of familiarity moves peripheral knowledge into the subconscious, so when the young lad tries his own hand at the processes: he seems already “good” or “comfortable”.
Intelligence is a capacity to take TopicA, which is NOT TopicB; but take lessons, object permanence, and other *conceptual* ideas about TopicA, and attempt to apply them to TopicB.
Take a graphics designer who just *really* seems to have a knack for putting together beautiful web sites. They have a “talent”.
But, upon examination – you realize they sat with a parent and did collages as a kid. They scrap-booked. They decorated their own room. etc. etc. etc. All of these fold together, to make us learn things MUCH more rapidly if they *seem* related to us.
This is where we circle-back to the Synapse and the Neurons. You had a cluster of Neurons that all *knew* about happy design and layouts. But, now you had to apply it to a digital space. No problem your brain says! Some bridges are made, and pull really hard together – and now you have new connections! “TopicB” was the digital realm, while “TopicA” was layout, design, and aesthetics. You ‘leaped’ over a learning barrier seeming much faster than normal, because you had related knowledge. Or more accurately – knowledge that your experiences and intelligence level were able to relate.
‘Talent’ usually catches a few things together, all bundled together in a convenient single word.
First is just a physical aptitude. As they say in basketball: you can’t coach height. If you’re huge and heavy with quick legs, you’ll be a talented linebacker. If you have long fingers with good nerve density, you’ll be a talented pianist. Michael Phelps can attribute some of his extraordinary potential (which he has realized) to his massive wingspan and other physical features. Similar things for ballerinas, acrobats, etc.. And before some pedant tries to pleasure themselves in my replies: obviously this is all assuming such people are on equal mental footing.
Speaking of mental: in the same way a body develop with variance that may inclines it towards talent in physical activities, the mind (and any other nerves) can develop with variance that inclines it towards talent in mental activities. Many great musicians have high fidelity hearing that allows them to pick out notes in a way less talented people simply cannot do without training (or not at all). There is a growing acknowledgement that top athletes can see better (faster or clearer), with obvious benefits in any sport. A person with a skill for understanding their balance and proprioception (knowing how their body is positioned) will do well in acrobatics. And I don’t think it’s crazy to think that a person’s brain can develop better-than average memory, decision -tree-exploration or risk-managsment that gives them an early edge in strategy games.
Finally; there is a large element of motivation or passion. This may be more important than any but the most extreme physical or mental differences, but someone who is just passionate about a thing will seem, or be, more talented. They’ll practice more, they’ll think about it more, they’ll pursue “better” instead of settling for “good enough” leading them to exceed expectations. This might look just like a physical or mental edge, because this person may hone their skill enough even when it doesn’t seem like they are, that it manifest just like an inate ability. And they won’t treat their physical limits as something to stop at, they’ll treat limits as pressure to work around. Of course, someone who’s 4′ will need super-human passion and probably some other physical skill to be perceived as “talented” at basketball, and same for someone with extreme dyslexia being “talented” at Scrabble. But such miracles have happened.
Some people balk when they are called “talented” because they want to attribute their success purely to their own work. But can’t their motivation to do that work be called a talent? At the end of the day, where someone’s own agency starts and ends against their inate nature is an open question. That’s why it can be so hard to determine what “talent” really is.
Some people have innate abilities that they are born with. Like I’m 5’4″ I could practice basketball for 10 hours a day my whole life and I’m never going to make it to the WNBA.
Learning speed and learning cap combined with natural execution advantages.
Talent is the degree of excellent performance achievable while using learned skills.
I want to say that talent is different from physical capability. So someone with longer legs has the potential to become a better runner. I don’t think that’s talent, personally.
My experience is that talent comes from obsession. It comes from a drive to become better at some skill, or even a total focus on doing that skill over and over. The drive comes either from the fascination with the act of doing the skill, or from an obsession with gaining mastery over the skill.
I’m sure some people learn faster than others, but that alone is not enough to become talented, you also have to have a drive to continue learning it.
Talent is the innate ability to do it. And not all skills can be taught and learned.
People are different some skills fit better to different mindsets.
Altough learning a skill is less about talent then about having a learning method fitting to you. (Which is a completely different skill.)
In school you would be sitting next to a classmate, learning the same thing from the same teacher at the same time, completely equal and identical. And one of you would understand it quicker than the other. That’s talent.
There are degrees within a skill set.. you can only be taught so much. A person with a talent in that skill set will achieve higher degree of mastery, or progress faster than others, understands and internalize the mechanics better etc..
Check out this video. It shows a talented pianist playing five increasing levels of difficulty.
Start at 3:29. Simple stuff.
Then skip to 12:34. Much more complicated.
Skill can be as simple as playing the right notes at the right time.
Talent is when you can embellish and improvise, it’s clear you’re not just following steps, but “feeling” things too. It might even feel like it comes naturally, it looks easy even though we know it’s not easy at all.
You can apply this analogy to anything.
You can sing syllabic, or melismatic.
You can write like Dr. Seuss, or you can write like Chaucer.
Talent is simply being good at something without it ever needing to be taught or practiced. Someone talented in art can just pick up a pencil or paintbrush and create beautiful pictures. Or grab a lump of clay and create amazing sculptures, just usually by memory of what something looks like. They usually have amazing visual memories.
A talented athlete can just jump into a sport and be good without any prior experience or teaching. They can watch someone do something and can immediately do it. They have amazing mind-body coordination.
A talented musician can just pick up an instrument and instinctively know how to play something that sounds good. They have a mind for sound and patterns.
A talented chef knows how to combine ingredients to make food that tastes good. They have a very strong olfactory mind.
It’s basically brain differences that create talents. It’s something people are just born with, and no matter how hard someone works at something, if it doesn’t “come naturally”, they will never be as good as someone for whom it does come naturally.
Talent is a myth, especially talent that’s not physical.
Even in sports, talent is just a result of being born close to the age cutoff for youth sports.
Basically a mix of 2 things:
The point on the curve where you start and also the maximum point you reach.
A talented person will probably be better as someone else when picking up the thing and if both of them practice the same way, they will probably be way better
There is a great current debate among educators if creativity can be taught, or is inherent. “Maybe it’s Maybelline.”
Skills are usually going to be something that can be done. If it can be done, it can be failed, succeeded, done on purpose to find the most effective manner to get favorable outcomes. Skills can be refined
Talent is usually defined or observed as more inherent. Michael Phelps with his shore arms, Simone Biles with her piston thighs and tiny frame, are inherently advantaged to their fields. These may appear to be more affective (circumstantial) in nature.
However, circumstance, coincidence, only look that way to those of us that are not focused on the subject at hand. We go to a company picnic and may marvel at quiet Sadira who is ripping apart the game of volleyball. It may seem like talent, luck, but we are not privy to the years of practice she put on on the varsity team.
My contention is that talent is hermaneutic (subjective) to the eye of the beholder. Some talent may seem useless, some may seem godly, depending on what we value as observers. Just some possible perspectives we can consider.
Talent is the ability to learn a skill faster, and with a higher ceiling, than somebody untalented. In most cases, talent without work is worthless.
How fast you learn, how well you can improvise and extrapolate from what you’ve learned, physical aspects which aid in performing the skill.
An average person will spend roughly the same effort on a skill for less of a result than a talented person.
Some of it is innate, some of it is starting early, some of it is having cross trained relevant skills. It all gets baked under talent because there are too many variables and not all of them are well understood.
Formula 1 is an excellent show of talent vs skill. Fernando Alonso started in 2001, we have some F1 drivers who never the sport without Alonso. The fact he has been in the sport for so long is learned talent. On the flip side, Kimi Antonelli an 18 year old rookie Mercedes hired has built in talent as this is his first season and so far he’s been extremely consistent and in the top 10 for the 3 races that have already occurred
Counterpoint: talent is a word used to gatekeep a field of work or art. Teachers reward students who learn a skill slightly quicker than the rest, and give them more resources and instruction, which widens the gap between those students and their peers.
This is not to say that everyone can be proficient at the same degree. This is why we run races and critique art. But if you are starting to learn a new skill, stay away from a teacher who believes in talent.
maybe a sports example will help. talent is the difference in muscles before you train, some people have naturally bigger or stronger muscles as well as how big your muscles can get if trained. It’s basically the limits you have on how bad or good you can get.
But to be actually good in something, you need to train the muscles, so they grow bigger and ‘live up to’ their potential.
Talent is how quickly and proficiently you can pick up and learn a particular set of skills.
Talent is another word for aptitude, a natural inclination to be good at something. You can be very artistic and understand engineering, but if you don’t have ability to see things in four dimensions in your mind you won’t be as good an architect as someone who can see things in four dimensions and is also very artistic and understands engineering. You can study music and be very good at it, you can learn intervals and pitches, but if you don’t have perfect pitch, where a certain tone is as obvious to someone as the color blue is to most people, you won’t be as good as another musician who puts in the same amount of work that you do, but also has perfect pitch.
Talent is an aptitude to learn a specific thing.
Everyone who has hands can throw a ball once they’re taught how. They now have the skill to throw a ball.
Given practice, talent will decide how quickly you learn to throw a ball well. If you are talented at it, you will learn to throw better faster than others (i.e. with less practice).
This is why kids who are talented at art seem to be so good at it intially. They have the ability to learn in 5 years what might take most people 20.
Physical capability is not talent. An athlete that has the bodily genetics to be a 6’6″ basketball pro is what I would call physically gifted (I’m sure there’s a better word, but it’s not talent).
Talent is being able to perform a skill at a higher level than most, all other things being equal.
So talent I think has 3 parts to it. First, naturally excelling at one or more of 3 areas BEFORE putting in the work.
Mind
Body
Mind body interaction
Mind – how quickly you remember, recall, creativity
Body – strong, fast, size, endurance
Interaction – how well your mind tells your body what to do. Think muscle memory
The second part to this is when they do put the work in, people with talent show more results for the work they put in.
The last part is their talent ceiling. Their mastery of the skill can go beyond most others and reach places that others cannot.
For example we have 2 people both learning to play the guitar. One finds they are talented at it and the other is average. They both put 100 hours into learning. The talented person has learned notes, chords, and some intermediate and advanced Talented person can play songs and make some of their own music. The average person at the end of 100 hours may still be struggling on basic to intermediate chords and can’t write their own music yet.
In this example both people put the same time in however one excelled at learning and in practice by being able to learn quick and apply it.
Now let’s go further both play for 10000 hours. Talented person may have reached mastery and has the skills of legendary guitarists and developed a sound of their own. The average person may have advanced skills but not as good as as many as the talented person. The average guy keeps playing but may never be as good as the talented person in this example
Talent though means different things in different areas. Some talent is just sheer muscle density so they can lift like a body builder. Some is creativity. Some musicians can’t write any of their own music but can play the most complicated song someone else created.
Simple answer: if skills can be taught and learned, what exactly talent is how fast someone get it.
Some people are natural at pattern recognition.
If you show them number series, they’ll quick tell whats the pattern, it can be taught as well. Talent would be how fast you’re catching up.
With enough skills learned through hard work, you can pretend to be talented.
You cannot pretend to be skilled no matter how ‘naturally talented’ you are, because skill requires practice i.e. hard work to develop.
Talent gives people an advantage in the thing they are talented at – e.g. a naturally gifted runner or gymnast or musician, etc. will achieve more for less effort vs. someone that does not have that gift … at least in the beginning. However, the more advanced you get into any art or craft, it is not the ‘talented’ people who reach the top, it is the hard workers who never give up and keep developing their skill.
Talented people who do not get the right mentorship at the right time, however, run the risk of burning out and giving up when the going gets tough at higher levels of performance, because things always used to come easily to them at the beginning. A talented person who never develops a work ethic is a wasted future.
TL;DR : talent is any natural advantage that makes one’s efforts result in better results than the average with less effort than the average.
Overrated. Talent Is Overrated by Geoff Colvin
Just about everyone can be taught how to make music from a piano. Certainly nearly everyone can learn how to plink out Happy Birthday. It’s a skill.
However, not everyone can learn how to play even as well as the average person on keys in a wedding band. Not every wedding musician can learn to become a concert pianist, and up it goes through the levels. That’s where the talent, or natural aptitude is. The people who have talent can probably learn to play Happy Birthday and it’ll sound pretty nice in about ten seconds, and some don’t need to be taught at all. It’s intuitive. The average person might need a few minutes to get it right enough to reproduce it, people with below average aptitude might need dozens of practice attempts to pull it off.
The talent goes deeper than it seems. It’s not like “Oh, Frank picked up the guitar last week and is already wailing, yet Jack has been making slow progress for a year.” and it’s a complete mystery. Frank has a mind that gets music innately and a body to match. Jack doesn’t.
What could be in Frank’s mind that isn’t in Jack’s? Music is, first of all, very much about the relationships between tones as well as the relationship between tones and empty space. As music gets more complex more is added, aspects of texture that require lightness and force, differing pressures, speeds, etc. So you need a mind that is set up in such a way that these relationships are obvious – I don’t mean thinking and knowing that you know them. A 3 year old with talent will blow you away on an instrument, but they don’t know that they know relationships and they don’t calculate how much pressure to get a certain sound. Physical, some people have long, flexible fingers that they have great fluidity and dexterity with, and some people don’t.
If you look at Frank and Jack again, you’ll probably see that their hands are different. The fingers may not be long, but I bet Frank has some looseness and flexibility in his joints or other parts of the hand that Jack doesn’t. You can’t get in their mind, but if you could you’d realize that Frank gets the relationship between times and space much better than Jack does.
Some people are just born with minds and physical attributes that make skills, like piano, a natural fit. Others have stubby fingers that aren’t very graceful. Others have little aptitude for abstract relationships. They can be taught to play Happy Birthday though, which is a skill, and not a talent.
Talent is something you’re born with. For example, my talent is I can fix anything. It doesn’t matter what it is or if I’ve never seen one before. I can stare at it and figure it out. I learned tips and tricks over the years, but I was a functional mechanic by the time I was 11. I had another friend who could pick up language like nothing. I don’t learn languages easily. I really struggle with them and it takes a great deal of effort. It’s not how my mind works. Michael Phelps has a swimming talent. He was born naturally athletic.
Talent is the social valuation of skill. Cool you can do a thing but who cares and why is going to be culturally situated.
Skill – I have to work VERY hard to play any string instrument even badly
Talent – I can pick up any brass or woodwind and play them fairly well without much work.
Applied interest.
People tell me I’m talented as a guitarist, but I disagree generally. However, I’ve played a lot over the years and have become good in my own way.
There are also more genetic, lottery type forms of talent. Mostly in sports (length of bones and ligaments and what not.) Or incredible brains, say Grothendieck’s. However, it still requires applied interest to become good.
Generally when it comes to sports, when a sport reaches the stage where the differences become tiny and people below a certain length or genetic category cannot really compete at the highest level (swimming, basketball, bodybuilding) I tend to lose interest somewhat. I tend to like smaller sports in that sense.
A combination of skills, practice, and last but not least, work ethic. Without work ethic, talent ain’t gonna matter much. You gotta show up. (A mash of two quotes. One from Jack White. And the other from Mike Tyson).
Talent is inversely related to Effort. Ability = Talent x Effort. The more talent you have, the less effort it takes to get to a given level of ability. And vice versa.
Think about it like a game. You have base stats and skills you can level up.
Talent is the basis for our skills. Some folks just have naturally higher base stats than others, which means they don’t have to work as hard.
Reminds me of Law of Ueki. “Having no talent means you just have to work harder.”
Talent is imo predisposition + interest. A person with a predisposition or talent for something will learn that skill faster/easier. Also, if someone is interested in a skill, s/he will learn it faster. If you couple an innate ease with interest, you have a talented person that already has it easier, but through sheer force of will goes above and beyond even that.
Skill is acquired technique, talent is natural grace with said technique
talent is a predisposition in how you apply yourself to problems and actions. it’s instinct’s cousin; practically applying the mental tools you have available to you outside of where you initially learned them or making them yourself to suit the situation.
That’s about as much as I can simplify it myself.
Skills are the things you practice and develop over time, while talent is like the raw, unshaped material that just feels easier to mold. It’s the person who picks up a guitar and instantly starts making magic, even if they’ve never seen one before. Natural talents basically just means you learn a certain thing faster and easier.
Talent is a combination of starting out better than average beginners and learning faster than average. You can get really good at something by working hard. But having same natural talent let’s you get better faster.
I’d say talent is a multiplier.
You could do 100/100
Or 50/100 if you had x2 multiplier because of your talent.
So you do less to gain more.
I like to think of it like this:
Skill is how MUCH you can learn. Talent is how FAST you can learn. Someone can be talented but never learn enough to be skilled, someone can be skilled but have gotten there through years of hard work.
I’ve always liked this quote and I think it kind of gets at what talent is.
There are two kinds of geniuses: the ‘ordinary’ and the ‘magicians’. An ordinary genius is a fellow whom you and I would be just as good as, if we were only many times better. There is no mystery as to how his mind works. Once we understand what they’ve done, we feel certain that we, too, could have done it. It is different with the magicians. Even after we understand what they have done it is completely dark. Richard Feynman is a magician of the highest calibre. — Mark Kac
I think that’s the difference. There are things that you could imagine getting proficient at if you we just much better at it or put in tons of work. Then there are those that just do it effortlessly.
It’s a combination of nature and nurture and this question really goes to the heart of that debate.
I had a buddy in high school, we were close to each other in build and height, similar upbringings, but somehow he was just always good at things.
Basketball, track, gymnastics, diving in the pool, hell hackisack even. Dude was also creative and could draw and do calligraphy and all kinds of things.
We were both two poverty cases of young people, not like he had some special training.
His dad was an overweight truck driver, his mom was an overweight homebody. He didn’t have any special access to training or anything.
Why was he so fucking talented at seemingly everything he tried when for me I could GET good at things but I had to practice 10x more?
Hard to say. Psychological, physiological, neurological…something was just different about this guy.
I’ve met a few people like that in my life, but most of us have to practice like crazy. Hell, maybe these people are practicing like crazy but they just do it in secret for all I know.
Take a singer — just physically, you have to have favorable vocal chords, lungs/breathing ability, musculature, and finely-tuned hearing.
“Talent” was originally (anciently) a unit of weight, often used to measure gold or silver, so in that sense, it could be thought of as a sum of money. The modern usage comes from the Biblical Parable of Talents. There are different interpretations of what the parable meant, but usually talents are some personal advantage (a “gift”) you can “invest in”, or use to develop further (or fail to).
Most commonly in modern usage, that means aptitude, or someone with aptitute/skills (like “hiring talent”, e.g. actors). But it could also be other advantages one could invest in, like connections (with people) or literal money.
Concerning aptitude in particular, there is a g factor measured by IQ tests that measures general aptitude for developing skills, but it has subcomponents. Individuals with otherwise high IQ can have defects in some of them, or specific learning disabilities. Usually those with higher IQs can learn whatever skill faster than normal, but only skills they invest in actually develop, and no-one has time to learn everything. So there are component parts to potential ability, and work required to develop those abilities, and the opportunity to develop it has to be presented early enough in life.
Besides the g factor, in the case of sports, some folks have a body more suited to one sport or another. For example Michael Phelp’s armspan proportion gives him an advantage in swimming. This is mostly genetic, but work was still required to develop the skill.
“Hard work beats talent, when talent doesn’t work hard” Sorry, just had to throw this in here 🙂
Some people just have innate natural ability at different skills. We don’t really know how or why it happens. Genetics are part of it, but nurture also plays a big part. Theres a lot of pro athlete/musician/actors kids that go into the same career at a high level, but is it because they were born with the same genetics, or because their parent(s) could train them from a young age at the level it takes to get that far? A bit of both?
All I know for sure is you can be born with all the talent in the world, but if its never nurtured or guided properly, it doesn’t matter.
Talent may mean your genes are good a particular activity.
Talent is just effort over time. Some have a natural ability to make things happen faster but for most of us, it’s putting in your 10,000 hours
Talent is doing it better than others in less time and less effort.
Easy…
It’s the TIME required to achieve a skill.
Consider Kevin Costner. He has a natural talent for swinging a stick, whether that’s baseball or golf. It’s just an innate ability he has to make a good swing. Others also have this ability. Other people work very hard to make that swing happen.
But, that’s not the only part. Even those who learn an action or ability progress and get better with it over time. They have taken what was a learned skill and honed it to a true talent. Mechanics learn how to fix engines and can follow a diagnostic flowchart to pinpoint the problem. A seasoned and skilled mechanic can use his talent to do that much more quickly because of his hard work to become better over the years.
That’s absolutely something with a definition that varies from person to person. I’ve always gone with “An aptitude for quickly and effectively learning a subject”.
You know the 10000 hour rule? “It takes around 10000 hours of dedicated and focused practice to become a master at something”? Its not totally accurate (its a rule of thumb, its not supposed to be totally accurate), but if we take it as a baseline someone talented will accomplish it in less time and someone untalented will accomplish it in more. So if you’re gods gift to guitar you can become a master in 1000 hours which is still a lot of time but its ten times faster than a normal person which I would say counts as talent.
Talent is two people getting the same initial lessons, having the exact same amount of time to work on something, but one of them comes out significantly more skilled than the other.
What could take one person decades to learn and understand, may be so painfully obvious to someone with talent that they figure it out in under 6 months
For instance, to anyone with a modicum of talent in art, it’s obvious that how thick or thin lines are will effect how a drawing looks. My lack of talent made me not realize how much that matters for over a decade. Anyone with a shred of talent would look at what I just said as if I’m a total moron due to how obvious that is. But I simply never saw or understood it
A starting point. Like winning the genetic/intellectual lottery, and not something anyone shoukd ever brag about.
In RPG terms, talent is a starting score.
Maybe a 3 in running but a 9 in drawing.
Then you can add 100 points with training and practice.
However, starting from a 9 in drawing makes me feel better about doing it so I’m more likely to keep at it and rack up those training points.
Just how I think of it.
The more innate the talent is the better it can be enhanced with training.
Talent is a combination of physical and/or mental ability along with learning and practice. Most of those very talented people out there would not be where they are without the learning and practice, you are not born with this. People have different physical and mental abilities. Let’s say you are really dexterous with your fingers but also really mentally in tune with music, you might be a great piano player. Or you can run really fast and are good at catching a football. With lots more practice and learning you might become one of the best receivers in football. But you already had some physical ability, running fast, judging a football in the air so that you catch it. But that is usually not enough to be considered a really talented person at it. That is where the practice and learning come in. And throw into that mix you need to be physically active. You may be able to run fast, judge a football but refuse to practice and get better. You would never become great at it so there is a mental drive in the mix too. It all has to come together, physical skills, mental skills, and a mental drive to do what it takes to be really good at something.
Different people learn at different speeds, and different people have different ceilings for how advanced of a concept they’re capable of learning.
It’s how you intuitively use the skills you learned in unexpected and original ways.
Lets assume for a moment that the world works like a videogame, everyone starts at level 1 in swimming, now lets think there are 2 people trying to become Olympic swimmers.
Now imagine that it takes 100 points of experience to level up swimming, after a week of training person A is at level 15 and person B is at level 2, that difference is talent.
if someone takes 10 hours of training to obtain 1 point of experience and another takes 1 hour to get 10 points, then the second one is more talented.
Another thing to take into account is that no matter what kind of skill you are talking about, the people are the very top are both talented and hard workers.
As they say “hard works beats talent when talent doesn’t work hard”
Simplest explanation: talent is the innate ability of someone to make something happen with little to no effort.
When I was 20, I had around 15 jobs in one year, sometimes working three jobs a week, just to find out if I had any talents beyond math, science, and computers. That’s how you find out where your talents lie, and it’s not always simple.
But, the easiest way to evaluate it objectively is, talent allows you to be good at things with minimal effort. Anything that you have to put 110% into just to do an acceptable job, you have no talent for.
One thing I definitely learned in my tryouts: I have the personality to sell things to anybody on the street, but I cannot live with the guilt required to make a great living at it.
Basically, I’d be a great salesperson with a ton of money today if only I didn’t care what I had to do for it. For instance, selling a used van to a grandmother for $5k over the list price and pocketing that extra money. I literally saw someone do this in front of me and brag about it, before deciding I am not cut out to be a successful salesperson.
Life experiences…
You can use a hammer to remove a screw but it is much easier to use an impact driver.
It’s the term made up by people who don’t actually understand the process of becoming world class at something to explain why some people are world class at things.
Skill/attribute multipliers.
In an RPG, you gain XP for performing actions and increase perks. The skill multiplier makes it so that you increase perks faster.
Anyone can pick up a paint brush and make art. Anyone.
It takes practice, patience, dedication and talent to create a masterpiece.
Anyone (almost) can drive a car. It takes talent to drive an F1 race car around a complex race track at 200mph without murdering themselves.
Skills are things almost anyone can do with good ole effort. Talent is what the naturals, the wizards, the savants can do with skills.
Talent is the shape of the path of skill (x axis) over effort (y axis). If everybody had the same level of talent, any two people that put in identical effort (in identical environment) would then have equal skill. But in reality, everybody has different talents, not to mention environments. Talents act to change the lower and upper bounds of skill and affect the rate of skill attainment over effort. Someone with different talent might begin at a higher or lower skill floor, might peak at a higher or lower skill ceiling, and the path between floor and peak as they put in effort might be a different shape. Often people use the word talented when they mean skilled which can cause offense because it disregards the amount of effort put in.
Talent is created through repetition of deliberate practice.
Talent is an intrinsic ability.
You can be taught to sing. You can improve your singing through practice. But doing so will not give you a better voice. It’ll just help you optimize what you have.
Your voice is very talent. What you do with it is skill.
You know this is you’ve ever developed a skill that you know yourself not to have a talent for. Example: I play guitar. It’s a skill for me, not a talent. With an incredible amount of practice, I could make a middling rhythm guitarist in a rock band. With the same amount of practice, a person for whom guitar playing is a talent would make an incredible lead guitarist. Something about it clicks for them: they make connections I don’t, find a sublimity in it that I don’t, achieve things I would not have had the imagination for guitar to attempt. They have a talent for it.
A natural aptitude. We, as amazing beings, humans, all posses it to a certain degree over a wide variety of different tasks. In our current times, we value and praise those that excel with a natural aptitude in regard to artistic expression, athleticism, singing/performing and the ability to acquire wealth.
To dumb it down. Some people are just naturally better at something with no training than everyone else and a select few people are EXTREMELY better than everyone else at something.
Now include training, proper coaching and direction of said talent. You have a Super Star!
To me, talent is both a natural leap (how good you are without any training) and stride (how much or little you struggle to advance per unit of effort) and of course the soft ceiling, what is realistically viable for you to achieve
So basically, a talented person all things equal will be or get farther faster, but without any effort against someone that does put it, it is unlikely they will win…. I’d you want a true eli5 of that, think of the tale of the turtle and the hare. The hare had more “talent” but no effort. The turtle would not normally stand a chance but it won because it was relentless
Talent is a pursued interest. In other words, anything that you’re willing to practice, you can do.
Bob Ross
Growing up, I was given a saxophone from my parents (I have no idea why). I played from grades 7-12 and even past high school for another 15 years.
I learned all the notes and fingerings could play pretty much anything. But I was awful because I had no talent.
I had no soul in my music. It moved no one and made no difference in any band I was part of.
Skills are meaningless without talent.
Talent is something you become good at because you are inclined to do it. You don’t have to force yourself to develop a skill because it’s already what you want to do.
My definition is talent means learning the same skill set for a shorter amount of time than the average. The short amount defines how talented you are, very fast is ‘prodigy’, like Magnus in chess.
Self taught is also self learning, so those who instinctually learned the violin or piano is also talented or prodigious.
Some things are skills, but you need the natural talent first. A good example is drawing. For me, I noticed in first grade that I could draw a little better than the other kids. I spent a lot of time getting better. When I got the chance, I took as my elective. Everybody was required to take 1 art class. What came naturally for me definitely wasn’t true for everyone.
Embedded capability to do so much more by orders of magnitude
You play soccer against a 3 year old Lionel Messi and you beat him handedly because he’s a toddler. You are more skilled than him.
Messi is now 24 years old and has arguably the best season by anyone of all time. No matter how much you train it is impossible to replicate. Messi is more talented than you.
Everyone can become a violin virtuoso. Some people need more than one lifetime to get there. People with talent can achieve it in one lifetime.
Talent is just a natural optimization for a given skill.
Take dunking a basketball as an easy example. If you are 6’ 10” tall, you can pretty easily dunk a basketball with little to no training. That’s a natural talent. Sure, a 6’1 guy can train enough to be able to jump high enough to dunk, but it’s highly unlikely that’s a natural talent
A more interesting talent is a soft skill like doing math or making art. Talent is having a natural wiring of your brain that lends itself to that skill. It’s why young kids can just naturally pick up on a skill with little to no formal training.
Talent is hard-to-define skills that you already know but never formally learned. Like I’m “talented” at building projects for my job because I played with enough toys to internalize things like compressive vs tensile forces, lateral shearing forces, reticulation and so on. It’s why my shit doesn’t fall apart.
I’m “talented” at photography, holding upset animals, assisting surgery, and running the excavator because I’m skilled at small hand movements and using anchor points to prevent my hands from shaking and a hundred other tiny foundational skills. Natural talent that goes all the way back to genes nearly doesn’t exist.
i’ve always considered that “talent” is often just a lot of hard work and time and the luck to be able to pursue specific skills. this can also be largely a matter of growing up with money.
almost all musical and visual artists are good at what they do because they’ve spent hours and hours, and hours and hours, being bad at the thing at first, and then trying again anyway. over and over.
my art history is rusty at best but i think it was da vinci who would destroy the sketches he made in preparation for his paintings. the idea being, he didn’t want people to know that he worked hard on preparing, solving the puzzle. he wanted people to believe that his “talent” was a gift from god and that the images just flowed out of him because of his divine gift.
Talent is having long legs if you play basketball, or long and quick fingers if you play the piano. It’s the physical aspects that help you achieve your goals, that others might lack.
Talent is my buddy in early high school, who saw my brother and I juggling 3 balls and asked how to do it. We showed him and he started juggling on the first try. Tomorrow he was juggling 4. By the end of the week he was juggling 10 rings.
We had a unicycle, he figured out to ride it in a couple tries. Asked to borrow for the weekend, came back on Monday juggling 4 baseballs while riding it.
We were all in sports and we’d play 3 v 1 touch football and lose, because none of us could ever manage to touch him.
You can teach a skill, but you can’t teach the ability for coordination to just make sense and click the very first time you try anything that requires manual dexterity, that requires talent.
(He was a super nice guy, but oh my God was it so irritating!)
Talent is the ease with which you pick up a skill. For instance, I have a talent for drawing. Ever since I was little, I drew better than the other kids. None of us took art classes, I just had an inmate grasp of proportions. Conversely, I’m not talented at sports because I don’t have good coordination and I’m weak.
Talent is also how good can you become at specific thing.
Example there could be 100 kids training basketball the same and none of them will get to nba level.
Also in professional settings basically everybody is training just as hard yet some are better and that’s talent.
The say success is 90 percent work and 10 talent. While this is true you usually need to be in 99 of a sport to be successful so no mather how much training without some talent you will never make it.
You might call a kid talented because they would have had such little time to be so skilful. But you rarely say an adult is talented because you don’t know how long they have taken to be come skilful.
Talent is an ability that is super easy or second nature from the start for that individual. Skill is the amount of time on that ability, the talent, the training, and I’m sure other factors, combined, which would produce different levels.
The woodworker who has horrible talent, but has a lot of time on the job, and has a decent amount of work related trainings, would produce non exceptional works but rarely pieces that were flawed in any major way.
A woodworker who is basically a savant with only a couple years of experience and minimal training, would probably produce works that were very high in quality, but would also make mistakes that experience or training could prevent.
Skill is a demonstration of what you’ve learned.
Talent is how easy it was for you to learn it.