Beautiful Minds

Marcel Proust had an intriguing perspective on this: "But genius, and even great talent, springs less from seeds of intellect and social refinement superior to those of other people than from the faculty of transforming and transposing them....

"Those who produce works of genius are not those who live in the most delicate atmosphere, whose conversation is the most brilliant or their culture the most extensive, but those who have had the power, ceasing suddenly to live only for themselves, to transform their personality into a sort of mirror, in such a way that their life, however mediocre it may be socially and even, in a sense, intellectually, is reflected by it, genius consisting in reflecting power and not in the intrinsic quality of the scene reflected." [From In Search of Lost Time.]

What's your take on people who do seem capable of quite anthing? (Not everything, but just about anything, maybe.)

I never considered talent innate because mediocrity with dilligence can transform into above average skill.

I'm not saying that any baller can be Kobe Bryant, but perhaps any non-athlete can make a great baller with the will and practice to become so. For instance, I've always told people who laud how talented I am that my one talent is the ability to quickly learn anything that I set my mind to. I wanted to be a poet, I'm a fairly decent poet (per audiences throughout my state and others who have read my books). I wanted to be a songwriter, I'm a pretty great songwriter. I wanted to write fiction, when I get the bite to write, I'm pretty good. Never the athlete, when I decided I wanted to run track in high school, I worked at it with a great coach and went on to routinely place 2nd or 3rd in any race I competed in. Not saying that willpower makes one brilliant. But certainly, I'm not an innate track runner, poet, songwriter, story teller, dancer, singer, painter, etc.

I do happen to believe that when it comes to this, conceptualizing what we're capable of in terms of innate and learned may in many ways limit us. Perhaps you were a gifted instrumentalist because you knew of your family connection to music and conceptualised your talent as innate, thus motivating you to pursue it more dilligently. In the same way, had your relative been a ballplayer, might you have expounded upon your basketball abilities?

I notice that you have used the chart that I made of Prof Gagne's ideas and placed it on my website. Now I see it on your website.
That one is now out of date as Prof Gagne realized that chance played a much more significant role in the moving of innate potential to expression as talent than he had thought in 1995. You will probably need to do some reading in Epigenetics now as it seems that the genes are turned on or off by a nurturing environment or not.