https://www.threepanelsoul.com/comic/talent
It’s an oldie from 2015, but I still think about it whenever people talk about being talented at something.
If they weren’t talented then they never would have been able to start.
That’s luck based.
ITT: Neurotypicals assuming anyone can do anything with time.
Talent alone won’t cut it. There is the passion and the work. The news had a recent thing about a love letter michael jordan had where he told his love that the only thing he would love more is basketball. But he did not get to where he got with just passion and hard work. He had talent to. Im in tech. I love technology and have a knack but I also got a bachelors and masters degree along with certifications. Pretty much everything is like this.
David Epstein’s The Sports Gene talks about several areas where it’s a feedback loop between nature and nurture:
- One’s starting point, of how much an untrained or unpracticed person is able to do something, is a big influence on whether someone even starts down that formal track.
- Simple access to training resources is a big determinant of whether a person will try those things. That’s why pro hockey players tend to be born in the early months of the year, or why so many bobsledders are from Upstate New York.
- People respond differently to training, and how quickly one improves influences a lot of whether that person intends to continue putting in the work.
- People’s ceilings are in different places. For many sports, being world class literally requires certain genetic coding: very long limbs, very accurate eyesight, very high Achilles tendons, certain biological adaptations for altitude or holding one’s breath, etc. Someone who is only slightly taller than average will struggle to make it into the NBA, no matter how much practice.
- The internal drive to practice possibly has a genetic component, too.
But outside of all of that, it also matters whether we’re talking about becoming a world class athlete or just a hobbyist. For weekend warriors running a 5k in a pack of thousands of participants who paid to be there, practice and training are going to be far more important predictors of their performance than any kind of genetic or innate talent. The genetic or innate bottlenecks might show up in the Olympics, but not the amateur hobbyist runners.
“You’re lucky you had parents who could afford: a piano, an apartment big enough for a piano, time for you to practice besides your studies, and maybe even a music teacher”
Excuses. You can start practicing on a cheap keyboard or digital stage piano you can find at a thrift store that you can play on your bed. You don’t need to have a stand up piano to learn to play. With internet nowadays it’s very easy to learn the basics like learning scales and reading sheet music. And you can practice between studies. You don’t need to practice hours a day to learn some basic songs. Like 10 minutes a day can take you very far.
Ah yes, everyone who didn’t have the privilege of growing up with parents who actually care about their child’s hobbies instead of busy verbally and physically abusing them or had the money to spare to buy a working used piano, which I have never personally seen at a thrift store, instead of skipping dinner for a week is obviously making excuses.
While we’re at it, let’s also pretend that being taught by youtube is the same as having a real instructor giving you feedback and on a real piano. I don’t even know why we bother having schools or teachers anymore because after all, anything can be learned from the internet if you just pull yourself up by the bootstraps. Oh and don’t forget you parents better afford to buy you a smartphone or else goodluck watching those tutorials.
It’s obvious from the comic that it doesn’t talk about the way you mention doing it.
Much better
Ah, one of the rare SFW Oglaf comics.
How do they get food in there, and other science facts?
It’s just a comic, you really should just relax
magic stasis I presume
literally ‘a wizard did it’.
From the guy who wanted to be a 5-star Michelin chef (material gets provided). Just pray he already is there for a while.
maybe woosh @me but Michelin stars only go up to 3
well, he’s gonna be there a while then.
He wants to be the first to get 5
Bathroom…
Bill
Related: “Your camera takes good pictures!”
You made my eye twitch.
There is merit in practice, but natural talent is very real. One person could spend years practicing something that someone else picks up and surpasses that person in a year.
Im a low low ELO player but enjoy chess. I teached a kid how to play on a summer event, and the kid, probably around 10 years old, never did the same error twice and easily beat me on the third day (around 5 games a day vs me and who knows how many against the other event leaders)
Really humbling, but I think I helped kindle a new hobby for the kid
Kids are just really good at learning quickly. That’s all it is, really. Chess is all about study and learning, so kids are very adept at getting good quickly. Obviously there are some who are prodigies, but that’s pretty exceptionally rare.
Adult learners also can get good quickly, but it requires a lot of meta-cognitive thinking (thinking about how you think, or “learning to learn”), time, and discipline. The guy that runs my local chess club is probably in his 60s, and he told me that he was sitting around ~1100 for a long time until recently he started studying, where he rapidly jumped up to ~1600 after, as he put it, “things clicked”.
It’s never too late to rapidly improve your own abilities, which is what I really love about the game, because I find it teaches you to apply that mindset to all aspects of life.
Nothing wrong with playing Electric Light Orchestra.
What’s your favorite song to play?
You did good. Fostering and developing the younger generation.
I compete in video games (smash bros ult) and there is a lot of humbling experiences when you are unable to beat a child that is 10 years younger than you every week for 2 straight years.
Natural talent shouldn’t be possible. DNA doesn’t hold enough information to make someone a pianist. Patience, coordination, and a learning environment, however…
You’re right, DNA wouldn’t make someone a pianist. But natural talent is considered a set of abilities people are born with that enables them to achieve success. It could provide the person with the right kind of hands, dexterity, hearing, and aptitude for learning piano to be a better pianist than someone without those things. That is what could be considered “natural talent.”
I’m nitpicking on the semantics here, sure. I’d rather call that a “better put-together human”.
No doubt, but imo “natural talent” is way less common than just people who have put in the work, at least for musicians in my experience. For every person i know that just started rippin shit from when they were 3 years old there’s like 20 more folks who have just put in the hours. I also think some people who seem to have that natural talent it’s more like they just were immersed in that environment from birth. Music is a lot like a language; you can always learn a new language as an adult but people that grow up speaking it because of their environment will make it look effortless.
In addition, a lot of the “natural talent” might be coming from early childhood practice when children’s brains are the most malleable - eg if a kid is drawing since they are 6, it is much more likely they’ll be noticed and cultivated. Which makes them more likely to appear talented when they are 11 / 15 etc, when they might be noticed and cultivated in turn etc. Early advantages pile up.
Not to say that some things gene related are not advantageous - you are not likely to become a basketball player if you are short, even if you put in enormous amounts of practice.
Yep exactly what I was trying to get at
Talent is hard to define. In my opinion talent = unobserved practice/study.
This picture gets the concept across pretty well. But it can also happen with kids that “happen” to be good at something. Like sports. Was that kid a natural at baseball, or did he just watch a lot of baseball games and played backyard baseball a shit ton so he just knew the rules/strats before any of the other kids?
Some people learn faster than others yes, but learning in itself is a skill.
Maybe this isn’t true, but it is definitely 100% more effective than assuming talent is outside of your control or an obstacle that can not be cleared.
Reminds me, Malcom Gladwell’s “Outliers” book had a section about his interesting observation that pro hockey players’ birthdays are skewed to the earlier months of the year. He attributed that to a kind of butterfly effect:
- youth hockey leagues set league cutoffs by age
- the early month kids are slightly older, bigger, and stronger
- because they are better at the very beginning, they get more playing time, more encouragement, maybe visit more “all-star” kind of things, where they might get extra coaching
- eventually those kids actually just become better, because they had a better environment to grow.
I mean idk how accurate this exact instance is, but I feel it’s a good thought experiment in thinking of how seemingly insignificant parts of the environment (like when in the year all the youth hockey leagues start) can impact whatever talent is. The whole nature vs nurture thing.
To be fair, to be able to practice regularly for so long to gain skill is rather lucky. Also, not all practice is equal, so having someone teach you to practice more effectively is a privilege. Either that or practicing on your own in an unguided manner and still being able to gain skill takes talent.
Yeah, that’s lucky and very well could require being lucky enough to have some sort of talent along the path.
This. It’s easier to practice/study if you don’t share a room with 3 siblings and don’t need to spend your off time supporting the family in various ways.
Also, don’t get mad at that person trying to give you a compliment
“Talent” could also be an affinity for practicing that skill. I don’t think I’m exceptional at programming, but I got good at it because I enjoyed it and that was enough to drive me to develop that skill. There are other skills I didn’t develop as much because I didn’t feel as driven to pursue them.
I hate that having to work so damn hard on something is the only way to success. I don’t have time to train for everything I want to be good at.
In my region, people use “talented” as a compliment, not necessarily to indicate their skill was not hard-won.
Ah, Mac Hall. Those were the days.
![Talent [Three Panel Soul]](https://www.threepanelsoul.com/comics/2015-05-11-370.png){kind=link}