I’ll say it, I am talented at drawing, I have always been. From a young age, my family praised my little sketches of art and cherished them dearly. They would always highlight the same fact, that I had a talent for drawing and that I should keep nourishing it. So I did. Now I’m an aspiring concept artist and I’ve improved my craft by leaps and bounds. But is it really thanks to my talent? Or do I owe my progress strictly to hard work, practice, and learning? Is talent a construct made up by society or is it a natural given advantage? Let us find out what science has to say — whether talent is born or made.
I still remember the exact day where my journey began. I was so mesmerized by a video game with a particular purple dragon in it that I felt the urge to replicate him on a piece of paper. And then another one, and another, and I kept drawing ever since. I must’ve poured thousands of hours into drawing, which accounts for a lot of practice time. This lines up with Malcolm Gladwell’s theory that states a person requires around 10,000 hours of practice to become an expert at something. Gladwell’s research found that the difference between elite violin players and simple violin players was that the more capable group had put in over twice the hours compared to the less capable ones. Interestingly, the study concluded that talent did not play a part in the result, with the only difference between the studied musicians and their performance being the amount of hours invested into practicing their chosen skill.
So then it’s true, my family gaslit me into thinking I had talent to take advantage of and encouraged me into sinking a chunk of my life into drawing! Well, not exactly. First of all, I don’t blame them for telling me I had a lot of talent for my age. There is a tendency to appreciate talent as something you’re naturally born with, which in this case relates to celebrating talent as a natural occurrence instead of a result of deliberate practice. I can see why the people that celebrated my talent for drawing did so in the first place, while in reality it might have been largely because of the sheer amount of drawings I pumped out weekly.
But that’s not everything there is to the story, because as it turns out, talent can play an important part in developing a skill. There are studies that suggest that people can be born with natural predispositions toward a certain discipline, with genetic factors playing a part in how well a person can execute and develop within a specific discipline. Psychologist Zach Hambrick found in his research that practice only accounted for a fraction of the studied group’s ability to perform a certain skill, indicating that natural talent can give an advantage when executing a specific task.
The way I see it, for the most part, being “talented” at something is more about the combined circumstances that have led you to become good at a particular thing. There can be a natural predisposition and underlying genetic factors that encourage it, yes, but it will all amount to nothing if deliberate practice and hard work aren’t part of the equation. I feel like that accurately reflects my journey. I’m convinced I wouldn’t be at the place I am right now with my skill in drawing had it not been for the hard work I’ve poured into it, but also how natural it has always felt for me. I believe there is nothing you can’t learn with enough time and practice, but at the same time, if you have talent it can be a big push that can take you very far if you carry through with it. It’s worth it to celebrate your talents, I know I do, but I also know that hard work and practice is what will make or break how good one can become at something.
