Talent is not born
I came across a 13-year-old girl on social media that was playing the violin in the street (busking) and I was mesmerized, my jaws dropped. Her passion, her ‘talent’ was just outstanding. It made me think about talent.
The first thing I would say is that she is so talented. She has so much talent that I bet that if she continues this way in a couple of years we will see her selling out Wembley Stadium concert. I wanted to share her performance on social media with my friends. While I was writing the caption, I wrote the word talent. This is what the word talent means: natural aptitude or skill.
I don’t agree that talent is a natural aptitude.
I think talent is a learned skill. It’s a skill that requires hard work, and dedication to the craft. It’s a skill that requires us to give our heart and soul.
I believe that some people might have better skills than others because they practiced more, or they love that thing and they kept on doing it and they don’t think of it as work, they just think of it as a hobby.
When we say that someone is talented I think we want to make ourselves feel better about the work that we don’t put in or the passion that we didn’t pursue. Because talent really requires a lot of work and dedication to the craft. But going beyond hard work and dedication we have to consider overcoming rejection, fear and opinions of what others think of us.
This reminded me of Michael Jordan's documentary on Netflix called The Last Dance. I highly recommend you watch it if you haven’t. But while I was watching the documentary I thought to myself I don’t work as hard as I want — not should, as hard as I want. It opened my eyes and mind to what talent really means = dedication to the craft.
Then I remembered one of my favourite movies, Whiplash. Again, it’s the same pattern. The boy wanted to become the best drummer of all time. Was he talented? No, but he become talented by dedicating himself to the craft.
Without knowing the teenage girl I decided to Google her. Her name is Karolina Protsenko. To my ‘surprise’ she started violin lessons when she was 6 years old. She was born in Ukraine to a musical family and moved to the United States in 2015. She began busking in the summer of 2017 in Santa Monica, CA. She has over 5 million followers on social media and over 400 million views on YouTube. Reading that I said to myself, “of course!”. It all makes sense.
We might not be born to a musical family or to a family that is passionate about the same topic we are, but we certainly put ourselves in a position to become ‘talented’.
How many people do we come across every day and see that they love what they do? Very little.
I think we can look in the mirror and remind ourselves, that deep inside we can all be talented if we put our heart and soul into what we do.
Next time when we see someone talented, we should say that talent is born, we should say talent is created, talent is practiced, talent is hard work.
