As a creative type, I was ‘showered’ with this statement, maybe one too many times and believe it or not, I don’t think of it as being necessarily a compliment (even though I know that 99% of the times it comes from genuine appreciation).
It’s very similar to admiring someone’s success and telling them ‘you are so successful’, but not knowing the underlying struggles, failures, long hours or countless rejections that resulted in that success.
The problem with these kinds of statements even if they are made in good faith and out of a sincere sense of appreciation is that they are reductionist in nature and don’t reflects reality, only appearance. Maybe this is just a testament to how we tend too often, to filter things only through their facade. Or, maybe it’s just a bias that we have a hard time recognizing or that we aren’t aware of most of the time.
While everyone can acknowledge that for both ‘talent’ and ‘success’ there are a handful of traits one can be endowed with, which can be helpful in steering ones interests in a certain direction or another, in most cases, both take a massive amount of commitment, consistency and grit.
What this means is, that even if someone is not ‘talented’ in that sense, with enough commitment, effort and work, one can acquire the skills that superficially appear as ‘talent’.
For example, learning to paint realistic paintings such as the ones I showcase on www.garageandgentry.com, took almost two years of full-time-job effort to get to the results visible, which means over 3500 hours spent on a chair with the canvas on a tripod and the brush in hand over a few years. And even though the skills and techniques are now solid, it still takes 200+ hours per piece from blank canvas to finished work of art.
So when we’re telling someone ‘you are so talented’ what we’re not recognizing is exactly the fact that in most cases that talent is the byproduct of many thousands if not tens of thousands of hours of focus, effort, practice and hard work which is behind it.
For someone who maybe isn’t aware of what it takes to develop certain skills and traits that one might simply categorize as ‘talent’, it can indeed appear to be just something someone’s been blessed with or fortunate to posses without real merit, other than being born with it.
Artwork: The creation of Adam • Michelangelo