The other day I was playing guitar and my friend said, “you’re so talented!”. It reminds me of a few years ago when I recorded and posted a song online and got a comment saying “Wow, pure talent.”
Though well intentioned, there’s something about that phrase that’s a little grating on me. When people call something “talent”, what they’re usually referring to is countless hours of hard work and effort, trial and error, failure before success. Me being “talented at guitar”, is probably just because I’ve been playing for 10 years, and that I’m in my last year of a Bachelor of Music, and that teaching guitar has been my profession for 4 years. It’s honestly not like I have a “special gifting”. I’ve literally just been immersed in music and practiced it in some form or another every single day for years.
The truth is, I don’t think I’m more talented than anyone else. If you saw my guitar playing 8 years ago, I doubt you would call me “talented”. I was a shy kid fumbling around with poor technique, hardly being able to read music or keep in time. My aural skills were underdeveloped, and in school band I always felt like I was playing catch-up, not music.
Talent is a natural gifting that someone is born with, which means they require significantly less effort to get the same results as anyone without the gift. For example, aural skills is now one of my great strengths. I’ve learnt to be able to pick out different notes and intervals with ease, and find the key of a song quickly. People often confuse what this is, asking if I have perfect pitch. No, I don’t. Perfect pitch is only something you can develop by age 4. People with perfect pitch can hear and recognise notes as easily as anyone can see and recognise colours. It’s a gift. I have what is called relative pitch, which means I can’t quite recognise notes that naturally, but I have a reference note stored as a memory, which I can then recognise other notes in relation to the memorised note. It’s a skill anyone can develop with hard work.
Hard work always beats unapplied talent. Some people were gifted kids, and were able to get through primary and high school with ease. I was one of these people who found school to be a breeze, but by the time I was an adult, I was shocked to find out how hard it is to keep up. Up until that point, I was relying on my talents to get away with things, and I hated working hard. But over time, others were doing so much better than me academically because they applied themselves and learnt how to work hard. They used to be the ones playing “catch-up”, and they’d beaten me now.
If you learn how to catch up with a talented person by your own hard work, half the battle is over. Is it any different to 14-year-old me playing catch-up? Many of those kids in the school band have given up music now, or have moved onto something else. But I never stopped when I “caught up”. I kept going, and worked hard for years longer. My hard work has beaten some people’s natural gifting. Completely immersing my life in music has done this to me.
Here’s something to go by:
Talent > no talent and no work
Hard work > unapplied talent
Talent + hard work > hard work alone
So, if you are talented at something, work hard at it too!
Caspian Scott 