YOU’RE NOT TALENTED

Popular knowledge tells us that genius is born, not made.

I’ve lost count of the amount of times that I’ve heard someone say that they could never do tattoos as good as me. ‘I’m not talented’ is usually what they say. Well, guess what, neither am I and neither are you.

You’re Not Talented. It’s about Repetition

You must put in hours of hard work. It’s the hard work that separates us from everyone else not talent. A recent Scientific study revealed that true expertise is mainly the product of years of intense practice and dedicated coaching. Even one of my guitar heroes – Steve Vai – says he’s not naturally talented at playing the guitar! To hear this from someone who I believe to the best guitarist that ever lived blew my mind.

Ordinary practice is not enough. You must constantly push yourself beyond your abilities and comfort level. To reach elite levels of performance. Your discipline and dedication are the key to becoming an expert in anything.

Popular knowledge tells us that genius is born, not made.

According to a study conducted by University College London professor Chia-Jung Tsay, we have a natural bias towards people we believe have talent. Through a series of studies, researchers discovered that managers show a strong bias for people whom they believe have natural talent.

It’s terribly seductive to believe that successful people are born with a natural gift. That makes it much more palatable to swallow any shortcomings in our own performance.

Trouble is, there is really no such thing as natural talent.

Anders Ericson a Conradi Eminent Scholar and professor of psychology at Florida State University recent published a study. He concluded that what people observe and call ‘talent’ can be accounted for as the result of practice.”

Co-author of the study Ericsson, said in an interview with Entrepreneur.

“We don’t know of any evidence, that would make some less likely to succeed than other individuals who are willing to engage in the appropriate training.”

Excelling in one subject matter or another is a matter of practice rather than innate raw talent so the authors say. This might be frustrating news to those who have spent their lives convinced that they are “just bad at math” or “just terrible singers.” Don’t spend years noodling around in search of a true calling. We should fearlessly dedicate ourselves to an area we are interested in and practice.

You don’t have a gift either

“A lot of people believe that there is massive amount of evidence that people have their gifts and that they should go out and look for what that gift is.,” Ericson says. “We argue that there is no gift to be found, basically that we are much better off picking something that they want to be good at and working hard at it effectively achieve a high level of performance.”

The notion that practice, full stop, is the key to success has been largely popularized by Malcolm Gladwell’s hypothesis of The 10,000 Hour Rule that states that really anyone can become successful at something if they dedicate 10,000 hours toward mastering it.

Where Ericsson and Pool differ is that they say that practice is not enough — it has to be smart practice. Putting in time and repeating the same efforts is not going to make you an expert at anything. But rather an individual has to be exceptionally self-conscious of the time being spent working on a task. Be working with a teacher who is a master of the particular topic already.

“To get improvement you have to do purposefully practice where you actually identify things that you want to change,”

Stacking hours of practice endlessly on top of each other won’t accelerate the process.

“There are constraints here on how many hours you can sustain that concentration to make improvements. And that will be a limiting factor,” Ericsson says. “Pushing yourself, spending more time, you will get psychological burnout. Where there is no physical problem, it’s just that you are tired and you have lost your motivation. And that is something that happens occasionally when people put in too much effort”.

You need to find that perfect balance. Where you push yourself as much as is necessary and then you get enough rest.