Why You Should Know That Talent Is Overrated

We are making the same mistake over and over.

When I was little I tried thousand of hobbies, thousand of sports.

Every time I had my first class, I was eagerly waiting for the teacher to say, “Wow, you’re really talented,” I would have been satisfied even with a “You’re good at this.”

But that never happened, not once.

No one in my life told me that I was gifted to do something after my first attempt. And when my 10-year-old self didn’t hear those words would simply let go and moved on to the next interest.

I wanted to be terribly good at something. I wanted so badly to be talented.

Jumping from one sport to another, from guitar to saxophone and from bartending to writing. Today I’m 24 years old and with no expertise.

No secret talent to showcase to strangers, no way to beg for money if I end up homeless one day.

I looked for that mysterious gift, I looked everywhere for that talent that would separate me from the average since the first try.

Spoiler: I kept failing all the time.

Talent is a concept that has always been appraised, held in high regard by all.

Most of the people we admire, our heroes, gurus, we all associate them with the word talent.

What makes us think that the people we admire were just born with it?

This way of thinking leads us to create distance between us and them, imagining that their success is due to a birth component that has continued during their lives, giving more and more mastery without effort, leads us to think that we could never be like them.

It makes them mystical and magical creatures.

That’s the case until we really understand what talent is and why it’s overrated in the society we live in.

“Everybody is talented because everybody who is human has something to express.” — B. Ueland

Every human being is different.

Each of us is made of our own perspective of the world, of our own past, of our own feelings.

So why do we think some people are more talented than others? Why do we put this adjective next to so many names?

They’re not more talented people, they’re people who chose a fight.

People who chose a fight and tried to defeat it day by day. Who woke up every morning with one thought in their heads and went to sleep with that same obsession lying by their side.

The problem is that we live in a society where we see the climax, we see the most successful moments of people, but we don’t always see what’s behind the curtain.

It’s not very glamorous to talk about the thousand auditions gone wrong, the hundreds of publishers who rejected their book.

We see the tip of the iceberg of years of hard work, sweat, and sacrifice and call it talent.

Maybe it’s easier to do so, maybe it’s an excuse we give ourselves for not having the grit and willpower to show up every day for our goals.

Diminishing and underestimating all the effort we feel better with ourselves because we think we haven’t received that golden gift at birth.

The truth is, no one’s good at the beginning. We all suck when we start and feel a huge gap with our personal definition of success.

In the words of Ira Glass:

For the first couple years, you make stuff, it’s just not that good. You gotta know it’s normal and the most important thing you can do is to do a lot of work. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions.

Talent is not enough, or at least it’s just a starting point. Only working hard will get you where you want to be.

So the next time we feel inferior to someone who’s successful, we should look at it with a different set of eyes.

We should try to understand what their starting point was. Let’s make them human. Let’s imitate their initial steps. Let’s dedicate ourselves to what’s bursting inside of us, let’s do it every day.

Because talent is just choosing your fight, success is winning over yourself.