Special
I ran across this panel in the comics page today, and couldn’t get my mind off it. I see this kind of unconscious condescension (and I do think it’s unconscious) all the time among people who are considered “creative” (and the reciprocal self-deprecation among people who aren’t). “You don’t decide to be an artist, you’re born one” and, conversely, “oh, I couldn’t draw a straight line to save my life, so I could never be an artist”. Guys, let’s stop this right now: the only thing preventing a person from becoming an artist is the lack of reinforcement for the process of becoming. In plain English: there’s not enough apparent reward to make us want to put the work in. In plainer English: if we’re not artists, it’s because we don’t want to practice.
Consider this hypothetical parallel (cribbed from Betty Edwards). Imagine that when a child arrived in preschool, she was given a book (no pictures, just words) and told to figure out what to do with it. No instruction, no examples. If, at the end of the day, she’d managed to piece together a few words, the teachers would label her “a reader” and encourage her to further develop her reading. Her parents would smile and say “oh, her uncle Dan was a reader – it runs in the family”. The other kids, the ones who hadn’t been able to make sense of the book (again, without instruction or guidance), would have mandatory, rudimentary classes throughout grade school, with assignments like “read this short story” – without any explanation as to how one was to do that – and by the time high school rolled around, reading would be an elective, taken at high levels by the “readers” and avoided by everyone else except to fill requirements.
If it’s unacceptable to think of reading that way, why do we treat art exactly as described? Show an early predisposition toward art, and you’re a “born artist”. Don’t, and you “just don’t have the talent”.
I’ll follow that with a caveat: I do believe that there are people to whom practicing a creative craft is more inherently rewarding than it is to others. At the same time, there are people to whom the practice of law is more rewarding than it is to others. I don’t think anyone would argue that law takes vast amounts of study and practice. Why would we believe that art is any different?
One of the songs I learned when I took piano lessons in my youth had the lyric “If I had even a fraction of Vladimir Horowitz’s talent, I’d practice all day”. It’s exactly the opposite: Vladimir Horowitz has his talent because he practices all day. Artists don’t draw/paint/etc. because they’re talented, they’re “talented” because they’ve spent years drawing/painting/etc.
Why do we persist in the “talent” myth? Because it’s reinforcing. Talent allows those with to believe that they’re special, that they possess a gift that separates them from the unskilled hoi polloi; and it allows those without to believe that their inability to do what they want to do is out of their control, instead of something to be worked past.
This is not to diminish the accomplishments of artists – far from it. But let’s recognize them for their hard work and real accomplishment – not for some imaginary “talent”.
I /strongly/ disagree. I don’t believe that innate talent is “imaginary” or just some “myth” that “allows those with [talent] to believe that they’re special,” and honestly, I’m frustrated that you write it off as such.
One can theoretically /become/ talented through practice, dedication, and reinforcement of success, but I wholeheartedly believe that some people are born– yes– with some higher measure of talent in some field. Some people can draw photorealistically without having ever taken a single art class; I know some people like that. Then there are art students– people who spend all day every day immersed in artistic endeavors– who cannot recreate a scene photorealistically to save their life.
Some people have the innate talent to sing in perfect pitch and create harmonies on the fly to a song on the radio that they’re hearing for the first time– two of my dearest friends in high school could do that, and nobody else I’ve ever met can. They never took music lessons or voice lessons; they taught themselves how to use instruments, but it wasn’t a matter of effort– they just sat down at an instrument and it made perfect sense how to play it, and they could improvise gorgeous musical pieces off the tops of their heads.
Some people are born with the ability to mimic sounds and voices; they just naturally have the talent to hear a sound and imitate it accurately. Yes, you can practice impersonations or work to develop different character voices, but some people are just inherently good at doing it. This is especially true in humor; some people have a sense of inflection, timing, and word choice, and no matter how much one might “study” humor, those aren’t things that can just be taught or picked up. A dozen people could tell the exact same joke, and it might only be funny coming from one person whose natural comedic sense /makes/ it funny.
I could go on and on and on, but point is, I just can’t agree with you on this one at all… I know you hate being told you “can’t” do something because you’re just not “equipped” for it properly, but I don’t think this is one of those cases; innate, raw, natural talent or predilection or whatever you want to call it /is not a myth/. It’s not about it being “more rewarding” for an artist; some artists produce amazing works and still hate both the process and the results, so there’s no reward for them anyway. You say, “This is not to diminish the accomplishments of artists,” but the rest of the post says otherwise.
(Sorry for the ramble.)
Jess, I respect your position, and to an extent I agree with it. I think that you think that I’m trying to take away the accomplishments of those who demonstrate high levels of skill. Nothing could be farther from the truth; but what I want to do is recognize the effort and dedication behind those hogh ldvels of skill, instead of taking agency away from them by asserting that their abilities are only due to some higher power or random chance. I don’t mean to say that there are no people to whom certain tasks come more easily; that’s obviously, demonstrably false. The lie is that a certain level of skill is ONLY attainable by those certain people. It diminishes the value of hard work, and diminishes the effort that the “gifted” have put into what they do.
I’m reminded of the old music-lesson ads: “They Laughed When I Sat Down At The Piano. But When I Started To Play…!” Ability can be learned, and can be taught. This is backed up by the studies quoted by Gladwell and others; they looked at “gifted” music students and discovered that the one thing the best students had in common was thousands of hours of dedicated work.
I’ll refer to your examples: I don’t doubt that your friends were skilled musicians, but can you say for certain that their ability was due to Innate Talent and not Hours and Hours of Work? Understanding an instrument is likewise a function both of a willingness to discover and of a knowledge of music.
Perhaps there’s a fundamental upper limit imposed by talent; I don’t know. But I think that reducing a person’s high skill to a mere gift from elsewhere – be it Providence or Chance – is reducing the scope of their accomplishment and doing their effort a disservice.
Jess, I wanted to follow up on this. This topic has inflated importance to me because of two factors:
* Every day I see people say “I wish I could do X, but I just don’t have the talent”, and it’s heartbreaking. So mang people aren’t doing what they want to do because they believe that only the special few get to do the thing they want to do.
* Studies have repeatedly shown that kids (I’m talking grade-school and earlier) who are told “you’re so talented!” when they do well perform measurably worse and are far more likely to give up on challenging tasks than kids who are told “you worked so hard!”. That indicates, to me and to the researchers, that relying on talent and “gifts” to explain excellent work is actively harmful.
I truly don’t want to take anyone’s accomplishments away. It’s the sense that one has to be BORN an artist/writer/whatever – that if one is truly meant to do a thing, one should not have to work for it – that I want to abolish.
Don’t forget, the next line of that song is “I’ve a suspicion it’s more than ambition, it’s how many d.c. al finés you play!” (which helps bolster your argument!)
Hi Chris!
It’s so nice to match the blog with the prolific tweets!
Just wanted to add that Michael Jordan was cut from his high school basketball team…
@Chris Anthony
No, my friends’ vocal abilities were not due to work, as I pointed out in my original comment; they’d never had vocal lessons, they were members of no choir. I had other friends who DID take voice lessons and WERE part of the choir which rehearsed several times a week, and I still have yet to meet anyone who can improvise harmony to a song they’ve never heard before.
Additionally, your defense of your position is all well and good, but it’s difficult to believe that the defense /matches/ the original position when, in the OP, you use inflammatory words like “imaginary” and “myth” to describe something that you assert “allows those with [talent] to believe that they’re special.” Because how dare the talented ever believe they are actually special..? My friends, for example, are two of the humblest people I know. Knowing they have innate talent has done nothing to inflate their egos. (And, as further caveat, they are siblings with no musically-gifted predecessors in the family.)
Similarly, in the OP, you write as if being praised for talent and being praised for effort (and their accompanying “mindsets”) are mutually exclusive, and that anyone who is told they’re talented automatically believes that they “possess a gift that separates them from the unskilled hoi polloi; and it allows those without to believe that their inability to do what they want to do is out of their control, instead of something to be worked past”– which writes off artists as inherently stuck-up and entitled.
I just can’t wrap my head around your position, but I’m not sure I want to continue arguing it into the ground.
Jaime, amusingly, I couldn’t remember the next line, except that it included “D.C. al Fines”. ;)
Hi Linda! Glad to have you here. :)
Jess, having not met your friends, I’ll concede the point for the moment. I think you’re reading too much into what I’ve said above, though; saying “X allows people to do Y” is not the same as saying “[all people for whom X is true] do Y”. But I’ve gone all askew from what I intended to be my original argument anyway, which addressed the absurdity of saying “artists aren’t made, they’re born”. I can’t see a way to read that as anything other than actively exclusionary, and I may have gone too far in the other direction in my ire. I’m sorry if I offended you.
To play devil’s advocate to my own presentation, I might point out that the plural of anecdote is not data.
This is so interesting on a lot of levels. I acknowledge Jess’ point – some people are born with incredible talent in one area or another. Good for them I guess. But MOST people are born not with innate talent but with innate ability to DEVELOP talent – which I think is your point (which takes nothing away from “born artists”). Everyone has the ability to read (although we might not all learn the same way or at the same pace) just as everyone has the ability to learn to play an instrument. But not everyone is encouraged to take music lessons or to practice and so they don’t learn. AND because some of us hate the feeling of being bad at something, we struggle with things like music lessons if it doesn’t come easily to us. If we’re not encouraged to be bad and do it anyway, we won’t continue to try and we will never be good.
Both my daughters are (for lack of a better term) “child actors” with some professional success. Their father started teaching them something very early on: It takes three things to be successful as an actor. You need talent, hard work and luck. There are tons of out of work actors who are talented and hard working – it’s kind of a given that you need both of those things. But luck – being in the right place at the right time, being the right height (that’s a big one with kids), having long hair or brown hair or blond hair or the skin color the producer is looking for – also plays a big role. But when we talk about talent – I do believe that it is something that can be developed although there’s probably a range in which people will fall. There are people who, no matter how hard they work, will never be great actors but that doesn’t mean that they can’t do community theater and have a great time doing it.
What I think your post says – very well – is that it’s sad when someone who really would love to be on stage says “I’m not a good actor, I’ll never be famous or as good as so and so, therefore I won’t even try.” It’s sad when people would LOVE to play the guitar but are so afraid of being bad, they don’t even take lessons (that would be me . . .). Who says that we have to be as talented as Jess’ friends before we can sing in public? Who says we have to label a child as a “born artist” before we can encourage him to paint?
I’m going home right now to play the guitar on Rock Band 2! And even if I suck, it’ll rock. Thanks Chris!