Talent exists, so why ask that question??

Maybe you've heard people saying that geniuses are made and not born.  Or something like, it's not that people are talented or that people are prodigies, they just work harder or train more efficiently than others.  Well I have to say that in everything I have seen, effort and methods have never been enough to account for the differences in results.  There's always been something else there.  Something that some people just seem to have and some people just seem to be lacking.  I suppose you could call it... talent.

Think about school.  In a PE class with students learning a new sport, all being taught in the same way and all learning by the same methods, even among the students that never knew anything about the sport before, you'll see a wide variation in rates of improvement.  Sure, you could say that some people care more, try harder, but that doesn't account for everything.  Take any class.  Simply during the class, before anyone has time to go home and study, some people will understand the material easily and some people will struggle with it.  Now, that's not proof that talent exists, but any explanation of the world that attempts to rule out talent or frame it as insignificant just seems so unlikely.  It's almost like saying, "Well I don't think gravity exists, I think everything moves in random directions and it's just a coincidence that everything happens to move down all the time."  You can't prove either theory, but I know which one I believe to be more likely.

Basically, talent exists, so why ask that question?  Why?  Does it make you feel better to think that the world is fair, that everyone who is better than you at anything must have put more effort into it, or learned from a better teacher, or something like that?  I mean, I can answer that question for you anyway.  Talent exists, and in everything you do, there will be people more talented than you, and there will be people less talented than you as well (unless of course you happen to be... -the one-).  So why ask that question?  Instead, why not ask this question:

What can I overcome.

Talent may exist, and the barriers it creates may be large, but I do not believe these barriers to be insurmountable.  Anything you lack in terms of talent will have to be made up for with efficient effort, but if you have strong motivation and a strong approach, what is there that you cannot learn?  I'm saying you don't need to be musically gifted to learn to master any musical instrument.  You don't need to be a math genius to get through calculus.  You don't need to be a master strategist to become a high-level chess player.  Now that's not saying that accomplishing such things would be an easy feat by any means.  You may have to live with the fact that it'll take you a week or a month or a year to master something that an extremely talented person could pick up in a day.  Still, I see no reason to set limits on your abilities, or to rule out goals as unattainable.

That's something you see quite a lot.  People setting limits.  Limits on abilities, limits on how much you can memorize, limits on reaction time, and even the idea of a fixed IQ as a limit to a person's mental capacities.  It's not that limits don't exist, but, as far as the brain is concerned, I don't believe that any neuroscientist out there even way off in the future will have a strong enough understanding of how the brain works to guarantee any limits like these.  To prove that one cannot memorize, say, 1000 numbers in 10 seconds, you have to know exactly, in complete detail and accounting for all the possible variations in the structure and workings of human brains, how the brain takes in information, how it stores it, and how it recalls it, and then you'd need a clear line of logic found inside of this information showing exactly why this task is impossible.  It's not enough to have some reasonable sounding theory as to why it can't be done, and it's not enough to test a million people and see that none of them can do it.  On an individual level, if you fail at a task a million times, that's not proof that you can never succeed in it.  However, if you succeed just once, that's absolute proof that you can succeed in it.

And now you say "Well that's all really easy to say when you're someone who seems to be gifted enough to be able to do anything," and well, yeah, I guess it is.  I'd tell you that it depends on how easily you become convinced that you can't succeed.  Do you call it impossible after failing on and off for a week?  Or finding no success after months of effort?  Or still not reaching your goal after years of dedication?  It is so difficult to prove limits on what you can and can't accomplish that you might as well call that impossible.  With that said, it's all a matter of what you want to believe.  I'd say that when you put in the effort, even in an area where you have no natural talent, you can often surprise yourself, surpass your own expectations of what you believed yourself capable of, and perhaps even rise to rival the abilities of the talented, enough so to make people assume that you yourself must have actually had some kind of natural talent.  I mean I'd say all that, but if you want to believe in limits and the barriers created by talent, then by all means feel free to do so.  Believe in the fact that you can never surpass someone like me in the areas where I possess more natural talent than you.  Give in to your label of average and accept that surpassing those with talent is a lost cause.  Or, on the other side of the coin, (and, like I said, without proof either way you're free to choose what you want to believe, but,) if you want to tell me that you believe in limits and impossibilities and that your higher level of talent is something that is impossible for me to overcome, (heheheh) well...

I think you could guess my response.