Talent is (Mostly) a Lie, and Practice Deserves More Credit
by Brad Poer, Guest Editorial
Brad Poer is a Professor of Theatre/Humanities at Kellogg Community College in Battle Creek, MI
Your great aunt means well. She just handed you flowers and gave you a misty-eyed hug- and as you put your arm around her to pose for a picture in the lobby following what you think was a pretty clean run of the show, she looks at you and says the thing you’ve heard many times from many people by now:
“You’re so talented- what a gift. I could never do that!”
Maybe for a while you believed it. How inexplicably fortunate you must be to have come into this world destined to have that ‘it’ factor?
Maybe you effortlessly kept the audience in the palm of your hand, feeling them inhale during a suspenseful pause or laugh uproariously at a glib punchline, or well up with tears as you held out that 8-count note with just the right bubble of vibrato at the end of that solo.
Or maybe you designed 8 projected backgrounds for the run on your iPad. Or you put together an entire cast’s worth of perfectly themed costumes on a shoestring budget without nearly enough time. Or called that beast of a show from the booth with 268 light cues, 3 dozen sound cues, and 27 fly cues- without the audience realizing anything was awry when it went off the rails for a few seconds before you coaxed the crew back on track via the collected, hushed tones of your voice over headset.
But over time, you’ve connected the dots from your past. All the time spent nerdily mimicking the voices and facial expressions of the cartoon characters you loved growing up. The hundreds of sketches and drawings you made just so your Barbies could have a suitable backdrop. Your joy at receiving a new calendar at the start of a school year, so you could spend hours planning and executing the color coding and tabs to make it simple to consult at a glance. Your friends coming to refer to you as ‘the diplomat’ after dozens of middle school emotional flare-ups were soothed because you could see the issue from all sides(and be trusted to respect those perspectives) in patiently sorting things out. The literal thousands of hours your parents spent with you riding around in the car between the ages of 6 and 18, singing whatever was on the radio at the top of your lungs, or humming constantly as you ate your snack in the kitchen.
All of that was training- you just didn’t realize it at the time, because you happened to be having fun while doing (most) of it.
All it took was someone off-handedly telling you you were good at a thing most people don’t spend much time on, and that was all the push you needed. There was no magical Talent Fairy bopping you on the head as you entered the world. It wasn’t genetics, either. The vast majority of what some call ‘talent’ is more precious than that. It’s skill. Capability crafted over years; honed by repetition and many tiny failures, which led to you simply dusting yourself off and trying again.
It wasn’t magic or fate. It was persistence. Confidence gained not by never messing up, but the truly resilient kind of confidence that comes from messing up a lot- and surviving and pushing on every time. Because it’s not like you were going to give up; what else would you do with your time? You have this one short, delicate life on this planet (as far as you know), and without realizing it, you sacrificed all that time over all those years to get good enough at a thing to make it look effortless to others who spent their time on other things.
Maybe the ‘gift’ received was your environment, for better or worse. Supportive parents who understood why you loved doing that thing because they were involved with it once (or still are). A town with a longstanding community theatre, a kindly neighbor who let you use all the art supplies left over from their own kids, or a school system that bothered to actually fund arts education. Even the traumas or rough patches in growing up helped guide you, as the thing you were into felt like the only way to escape, express, or soothe yourself.
Your great-aunt gives you a second hug after the photos, and you gently take her by the shoulders and look her lovingly in the eye.
“Thanks, Auntie- and I don’t believe it for a second. You absolutely could do it if your life happened to turn out like mine has so far. It’s taken a lot of work to get here! You only have to see the finished product. I’ve been working towards this since I was in diapers- I just didn’t realize it at the time.”
As you head backstage to grab your stuff before heading out to meet the company at the only diner in town foolish enough to still be open so you can sheepishly overwhelm the late-night servers, you wonder if what you said actually sank in. Then you decide that, in the end, it’s more important that it sinks in with you.
Where else in life have you attributed a fortunate bop on the head by the Talent Fairy to someone who earned their skill through thousands of hours of unacknowledged training? How much more supportive and generous would this world be if we all truly thought about what it actually takes for humans to get good at the thousands of things we can be good at? It’s at that moment you realize that maybe this crazy art form you’ve found yourself immersed in is one of the best ways to spread that idea to others.
Later at the diner, as the kitchen shuts down for the night, the server coolly comes around with perfectly itemized bills for everyone- delivered with a genuine smile. You think about how many times they’ve dealt with far worse than the likes of your cast and crew- and wonder what other talents they’ve spent thousands of hours working on.