Paradox of Talent

I'm not sure how it's logically possible, but talent is simultaneously underrated and overrated. It's overrated in that people think of this concept of talent as an innate skill that someone is either born with or became through years of struggle and now everything they touch is pure gold. I'm not talking about skill, which is more about technical prowess. I'm thinking of talent as (skill + creativity). A watchmaker is skilled. A watchmaker who designs and builds beautiful watches is talented. A watchmaker who makes technically complex, intricately designed watches that look like broken, Korean knock-off Swatches is skilled but not talented. In high school I used to refer to this as the Yngwie Malmsteen Fallacy. Just because he's able to play immensely complex chord arrangements in lightning quick succession, doesn't mean he's good. I mean, he's a good guitar player. Just what he does with it might suck.

Maybe the concept is more like (skill - character) < talent. The equation of what constitutes good is really kind of vague. There are poorly made trinkets of great worth out in the world, and there are also deftly-sculpted piles of excrement. I kind of grew up assuming the former was more important than the latter. To me, back then, chasing the idea of talent was a dead-end because you would surely sacrifice character in the process of constant practice and bitter struggle. Or maybe that was an excuse for urepentant laziness.

More recently I'm begininning to renounce those views. I've known of too many creative people with good ideas sit on their hands and watch it all go by rather than take a chance at making something. My previous views of innate talent may have been skewed by the world of published entertainment. If you look at the world of published media - bands with record deals, movies that are shown in theaters, printed books - you'll see that there's a focus on talent over character. If you look at the world as a whole, you'll see the opposite; too many tragic stories of languished ideas and abandoned projects. Even for the worst record ever made, somebody thought it was something of value, and it took a large degree of effort to record, mix, package and sell. More often than not, people have ideas that they spend little effort on.

A lot of this feeds into the independent music world of the 90s. That disdain for major record labels, even for a person such as myself who wasn't close to recording anything, was prevalent. It permeated into personal ideology. What I don't think I understood at the time was that all of that independent recording ideology was aimed at people trying to record actual albums. People who had put a lot of effort into forming a band, practicing, playing shows and crafting music, and then they needed to decide on where to record. It wasn't about effort. They already knew that balance of effort and skill that quantifies talent. Or at least they thought they had an album's worth of it.

Yeah, it's mainly effort that defines the difference. Interesting people with unique ideas that sit in the corner and pet them quietly tend to be ignored in favor of bombastic egotistic self-serving jerks who can feed off their own ego. Sort of an evolutionary strategy in that way. It's the 8 foot worm that makes it's own food.

—May 7th, 2009

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