Talent is bullshit
* Thesis presentation
* Examples
* Reasons explaining why
* Summary
Hello.
I'll start off by stating that one of my pets died a couple of days ago, and I'm probably sucking half the energy required to write this blog post from the recent event's anguish.
No matter how incompetent you seem to be at something, you can sometimes appear to be a perfect apparition of the master of that skill to some members of our awesome society.
They'll stand in awe, admiring a work that took sweat and tears for you to complete, and yet you're aware that it's a piece of shit when you consider the complexity of professional industry standard wizards.
I have some skills, and one of them is the ability to visualize things on top of a paper (or a digital sheet) better than the bigger part of our society.
I easily without much consideration throw a definition of my skill as mediocre for the least, and it is because I don't get as much practice at it as I want.
I can taint my mind with thoughts that I'm not talented like a few others, and worship those wizards in blind respect, thinking that they were born with such a huge and inapproachable talent. By thus, depriving myself from real progress by practice, self challenge and professional constructive criticism (a rarity, by the way).
My skill is mostly admired because I can (out of the blue ) outline a physical being almost perfectly, but I cannot add volume and color without commiting a sin against art somewhere in that work.
And I work on color and volume, I practice whenever I can. But I have other things occupying most of my time.
What I come to talk of is the myth of talent.
What is talent ?
The first definition upon using Google's define command is : "endowment: natural abilities or qualities".
I think talent is bullshit. It is used to cover up certain negative perks a human being might posses, or perhaps this person uses the excuse of talent to sweep under the rug the laziness of that person, or hide some disbelief in one's potential, considering mass population and lack of vacancies.
Of course, the ability to draw with satisfactory results requires many other skills - a good grip, knowledge of tools used and experience with them, patience, analysis of technical properties and some others.
Sometimes tools being used affect the quality of the work, but I do believe the quality of the tool can only affect the transition from a very good work to an excellent work i.e : tools don't affect the beginner much.
Why do people commit their life to blaming their genes for not granting them that talent they desire with their soul?
Oh, please. Look at the activities that occupy a huge portion of our workforce, and the young lings - TV, watching a fucking screen for hours at a time. Talking of bullshit, plain repetitive bullshit that has a repulsive source of inspiration.
The newspapers turned into a piece of colorful chewed wood with time wasting shit printed there.
I couldn't possibly understand why would anyone want to know what a certain celebrity ate for his or her breakfast and how does that contradict that pattern that was seen before during all the other breakfasts in the past year.
Do we require the presence of modern gods? Does technology deny ancient deities such as Zeus and Ra? Do we in result turn to DiCaprio (the fucking internet corrected my 'Dicaprio' to 'DiCaprio'!) and A.Jolie ?
All those activities turned addictions make the brain lazy, and the thought of talent achieves a greater space in our minds. Look at the modern gods, they're very talented and RICH. We can never be those things, we're useless pieces of junk born to serve others.
Those gods, can play different roles of talented people, living in worlds where a talent makes them unique. But still, this talent is not achieved, it is given upon birth from the gene pool of their ancestors.
This is not something we control, the message rings.
To summarize everything I wrote here for those who were too impatient to dedicate the time to read everything thoroughly- Talent is a bucket full of shit, used to describe something one cannot achieve if he ain't got it in the first place.
If you dedicate time to look upon your soul, and see the shit floating there, and taking more time to fix your own habits, to kill some addictions, you'll see more vividly the true colors of this world. And perhaps you'll be able to add some color of your own to this world, and it'll thank you back. The most intelligent denizens of this world will thank you back.
Thank you for reading this,
Apologetic Writing.
Next : The myth of news and knowing of the events around us, and how it affects us.
Saturday, 21 February 2009
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7 comments:
Great words looking forward but no way to subscribe to blogger to follow you. switch may to posterous. Garry Tan was reading you there and put a brilliant link to your post.
You are true, but society is full of human and culture mythologies to easily promote mental slavery among others exploitations. The "Talent" theory is just one tiny bit of bigger bullshit. Looking forward your next discovery :)
Are you saying that genetic variation in ability doesn't exist, or that we shouldn't worry about it?
I have a feeling that your definition of "Talent" is fundamentally different from mine, so we're essentially talking past each other. Regardless, I think it's valuable to compare our ideas.
Talent is a predisposition towards skill at a task. It's a collection of genetic factors that can be arranged by your intelligence (not IQ intelligence, but the intelligence implicit in consciousness) to allow you to accomplish complex tasks, like playing a piano, painting a picture, jumping higher, running faster.
Talent is not bullshit. Your talents are the building blocks that you later shape and stack into the person that you become. To deny talent is to deny that people are different from one another in anything but training and environment. To deny talent is to deny that the rock on which a building is built has any effect on if the building will collapse.
Thank you all for the comments.
# Olivier - I was amazed to find out that I got linked by an another blog, thank you for the reference ! I'll be posting once a week or a couple of weeks, depends solely on how often I get an internet connection ;)
# tigerthink - I think that genetic variation exists.
Using this excuse pointing a finger at somebody who figured out he or she is genetically gifted and lifted that gift by practicing it, and by that saying that you're not gifted in the way that other person is, and therefore there is no point of putting time into the subject, because you were never born with such magnificent skills and will never achieve similar glory, is wrong IMO.
# the ardist - Comparison of ideas blooms more ideas, and connects distant thoughts together.
I think our grasp of the concept of talent is similar, however this post represents people that are certainly minded in a way that doesn't benefit them at all. Which is sad, because people might spend their time doing useless stuff, and yet they're afraid to indulge in activity that doesn't flatter them, because they posses no such talent from what they say. Weird. People always looked up at the gods, feared their mythological might and status. This chain of thought is better when it's broken, it can practically free the mind.
Talent is (probably) bullshit... a facade... but is it a useful facade?
I used to think anybody could do the little things I do if they only applied themselves, but trying to teach others has taught me that it sadly isn't so. It may not have come easily to me, but to some people it doesn't come at all. Does that mean that although talent may be bullshit, anti-talent exists?
I believe in talent. Talent is an expression of what I call "the knack." Everyone has a knack for something -- you, me, all your readers -- everyone is unusually good at something. This means you can do something better than lots of other people, yet you didn't invest much effort to learn it. Once you have a knack for something, you can usually grow other skills around it, and this cluster of skills becomes what we call talent. Lots of people can do stuff better than others can: this is why we have so much specialization in our society. I believe, in the United States, the infatuation with talent has fallen by the wayside, like you said, in favor of crappy TV shows that, sort of, let us off the hook, creatively speaking. And so Americans shut down. But does it have to be this way? No. Is the pendulum of mass media and crappy TV shows beginning to swing back. Perhaps. So stick to your knack and be happy, and turn off the TV! : )
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