The Myth of Talent

Sawhill Creek, #7. Sawhill Ponds, Boulder County, Colorado, 2015

A couple of years ago, I wrote a blog post, Do you have what it takes?, in which I addressed the issue of talent and where it might come from.

The gist of what I think I have discovered? Talent is mostly just a lot of hard, consistent, work over a long period of time. (At least 10,000 hours of hard work, or so sayeth Malcolm Gladwell.)

So, get to it! Git ‘er done! Time’s awastin’!

The problem–and the distortion–is that we see the photographers after they are successful. We almost never get to see their awful images from the many years that came before as they were learning their craft/art. So, it is natural to think they just came out of the womb, smelling of developer, with a Leica or Hasselblad stuck to their hands, and their brilliant infant brains preprogrammed with a direct link to Getty Images.

There might be a few exceptions–people with unusual gifts (Mozart?)–but mostly, successful people worked very hard for a long, long time to get where they are.

The article that started me thinking about all this some years ago is a must read: The Myth of Talent (link no longer available, unfortunately), by Craig Tanner.

For more on this theme, you could also check out the book by Matthew Syed called, Bounce: The Myth of Talent and the Power of Practice. It is focused on sports, but you can transfer the same principles to the arts. His point: what mostly determines success is the quantity and the quality of practice. You can listen to author Matthew Syed, a top table tennis player, talk about his ideas in THIS VIDEO (22 minutes).

Then there is this wonderful 2006 article, What it Takes to be Great. Read through that for some great tips you could apply directly to your photography.

Personally, I have always thought that we are all artists and we all have innate talent. It’s just that “the system” tends to convince us that we lack such potential skills (“Your boy is…different, Mrs. Gump.”).

This is pretty much the point of my current personal journey in photography. I am trying to find and bring back to life that mummified artist I believe to be within me…the artist that has been inside, atrophying into dusty skin and bones, for decades.

Finally, that we all are ordained at birth with artistic talent is pretty much the good news that fine art photographer and painter Robin Griggs Wood brings us in this five-minute video (titled The Myth of Talent–imagine that!). So, here’s your motivational homework: