We Have (Far) More Talents Than Attention and Time

Have your parents watch other people play a piano and expect the same from you because you have long fingers that's suitable to play the piano? Or maybe, in school, you successfully ace the test of a single subject or perhaps an Olympiad without studying much because it comes so natural. These are talents. But we have so many talents, if you noticed, that we don't have time to pursue them all. Let's talk more.

First, if you read Angela Duckworth's "Grit", you most probably know that talent doesn't mean everything. Someone makes their talent to success by passion and perseverance. Passion is the willingness to attach your attention and time to the subject you love, irregardless whether or not you have a talent or not in that subject. Perseverance is the willingness to stay on the subject for long enough, usually decades, even after you reached the top performance level. Though, what one wants to talk about today isn't about talent being a bad indicator of success; how talent puts you at a higher starting point than average but not at the finish line; but how many talents we have and how much attention and time we could put into each talents.

Likewise, because we only live to certain age, plus each day only have certain number of hours, and we can only concentrate on certain things that we like; it's impossible to pursue every single talent. Say, you have a talent for badminton and piano. Each of these talent requires decades of practicing to master. With deliberate attention on imitation of top performance, though, you could reduce the number of practice time to reach the same stage as someone blindly practicing and failing their way to success. Overall, you still needs to spend some significant amount of time. If you spend it practicing badminton, you might or might not have time for piano, especially if, say, you also have work/school to pursue. There's a limit to how much you can do at a time.

So even if we are gifted with lots of talents, it's important to choose what you're willing to persevere about. One would like to say about choosing what you're passionate about, but there are counter-arguments against choosing what you're passionate about. Instead, you gain passion after you did something for a long time because you like it. So, first do something that you might find boring; then the longer you do, the more passionate you get at that thing you thought were boring at first. If you can't get passionate when you did something for half a year, most probably that's not the dishes for you.

And if you thought of pursuing every single talent you have; or at least quite a number of talents you have, you could never get it to the best you can. Even if your talent is your work, how much can you pursue a day? For one, that's three. If we practice our talent everyday, perhaps even weekends, we could only take up three talents at a time, at any time. One in the morning, one in the afternoon, and one at night. Though, if you'd like to have some rest, two would be the most. What if you have more than ten talents? Certainly, you can't pursue all of them. Talents are just something to boost your starting point faster than others; it's not there for you to pursue it if you are pursuing other talents.

Even more, it's not necessarily to pursue talents. For example, one loves writing blog post. Nowadays, one wrote at least a blog post a week. But do you know that, before one starts writing blog, how bad one's language is? By "language" one means "language course" in school. It's "just pass" or "barely passing": that's slightly higher than the passing mark, "E" grade, maybe 50% or 40% (or any other number) depending on your school's passing mark. It's by no hope. But that's because school targets grammar and vocabulary and extensive English usage, etc, that's just not very useful in real life.

Consider what you learn at school: the extensive English is only understandable in English-speaking countries; and the rest of the world uses easy English. If you could write easy English, your work might as well get attention from various readers. If you use what you learn in school, to write a complicated-English blog post, except for English-speaking readers (or anyone whom learnt their English to at least near-native), it's difficult to imagine if others could understand what kind of English you're writing if they have to Google Translate or search up the dictionary every few words!

Conclusion

So that's it. In conclusion, we are born with innate talents of a lot; but they're not necessarily pursued. Most talents will go "wasted", but that's okay, because we don't have to pursue them. They're like multiple choice questions, saying: these are what you have advantage over others, and you can choose one or two to pursue. The rest, just ignore. We only have limited time and attention: pursue the one you enjoy!

As an extra conclusion, talent will never guarantee success. As Grit told, talent is a really bad indicator of success. Talent just guarantees a higher starting line, but if you can't persevere and stay in love with your talent, you can't get anywhere.

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