Talent isn't special

People who don’t know a lot about me or music (other than the fact that music is hard and I am generally good at it) really love to throw the word “talent” around: “You’re so talented, I took piano lessons for a few months but I had no talent like you, it takes so much talent to do what you do,” etc. etc. etc.

Because I am too pedantic to ever allow my brain to just take the compliment, and I have done more research on talent than probably most people have, I often find myself a little irritated at these statements. There are a couple of paradoxical things I know to be true about talent:

1. The more I learn about talent (and ability, and psychology, and environmental factors, and just music in general), the more I realize I actually don’t have a definition for what talent is. It’s such a nebulous concept, and I’ve read different definitions of talent by artists/musicians, psychologists, and scientists. The fact that I can’t define it suggests it doesn’t exist, and yet it’s something I know and recognize is real. Like Justice Stewart and hardcore porn, I know it when I see it.

2. Despite my irritation at people ascribing everything I do to innate talent: yes, I am talented. It is not big-headed or egotistical of me to say and acknowledge that; through experience, observation, and a lot of reading, I know it is a fact that certain things have come easier to me than they do to other people, and that the natural ability I’ve had in some cases has given me a leg up.

3. Talent is not rare or, frankly, special. Raw, innate talent is everywhere; it seems rarer than it is because it takes a lot of happy accidents and just-right environmental factors—which are affected a whole lot by economics, classism/income inequality, institutional sexism/racism/other general biases—for someone with raw talent to find an area in which to excel, to then receive the careful nurturing required to attain excellence, and then to find personal happiness or fulfillment.

4. You can be talented at something and still be bad at it. Again, talent is not rare, and in most cases it’s not enough to get someone over the finish line of “being really good at a thing” without being backed up by knowledge and experience. All of us who grew up taking lessons and doing yearly recitals knows the pain of having to sit through listening to that one kid who clearly enjoys playing and does it with ease, but also hasn’t applied themselves properly and plays horribly unevenly or super loud and is just really unpleasant to hear. We’ve all heard that kid; heck, we all might have been that kid at some point. And, not to be mean, but every music school has a handful of people who are just so bad that you can’t help but wonder, “How did they get in?”