Talent is just a social construct
And why this is relevant for both an HR department and at personal level.
Please come aboard this analogy train with me. Think of a knight. Before the knight is knighted he has the same qualities and same family tree, but he just doesn’t possess the title. Granted — there needs to be several investments made before someone is considered talented. In the example of the of knight, before the knight was a knight, he was a squire, then a page and on top of that usually born in the right family. Looking at some indicators you could predict that the boy would become a knight, but he wouldn’t until he went though the system. An exterior source granted you a new title and upgraded your status— this is how this comparison should be looked at. A parallel system is the process in which at the end you are “knighted” with the title of talented.
You do the work behind the scenes until there is a tipping point. You enter the stage, then you get noticed. People act like talent is this mystic gift from the Gods above that only a few have. You’ll get that “yeah, yeah it’s work, but it’s also that je ne sais quoi”. That je ne sais quoi is the work that was put into the craft even indirectly, that you didn’t imagine possible. Let’s take for example Beethoven. His father was a composer which helped him pick up piano and violin faster and younger in life than most kids. He used his talent as an entertainment for him and his drunken friends. Beethoven started playing at the age of three and by thirteen he already had published his first musical composition. This was the work behind the scenes. He found refuge in music and worked relentlessly to stay there.
I know this very well because I was “knighted” as talented in my life in two different fields. I started skiing at the age of three and I was fearless. I remember yelling at my dad on the ski slopes to stop hovering over me, even tough I was heading straight into a skilifts most of the time. Or the long days until the age of 6 spent skiing just me and my dad — morning ‘till dusk. At 6 years old, I became a professional alpine skier. I entered the stage. Then people started calling me talented. Overtime, I took practice less and less seriously, but my results were still good. The time spent skiing until I became a professional skier was till serving me. I was running on inertia. Of course, this latent speed stopped and my results reflected that. Then, my talent-meter went down. The other area is art. Just like Beethoven, I too, took refuge in scribbling from the day I could hold a pen. My art teacher used to compare me with another girl “you see, Agatha, you have talent but Cristina, well, she does the work”. No. I used to do the work, but now I wasn’t.
So, the recipe to get a place at the extraordinary table is meet the specifications + a pinch of je ne sais quoi. But this is a faulty, destructive system.
Fishing for talent from an HR Department
Besides the fact that the specification shift from person to person, based on their own perspective, it’s also a distraction. Talent is as abstract as an Pollock piece. There are entire strategies build on how talent should be recruited and budgeting around that. There is the employee profile with all the right degrees and the perfect experience age. But are you really recruiting for talent of just the qualified person? In this arena talent becomes a checklist that sells itself like a limited offer. You should be looking for habits that build the type of employee you want to get. You should be looking for coherence between words and actions, for vulnerability, the most relevant indicator of courage. For equilibrium. Work ethic. Curiosity, pain resistance, the desire to play. Imagination. All of these are much stronger than an arrow shot in the dark at (what-you-think-is) talent.
At a personal level?
Being placed there, on a pedestal, talented people can be either inspirational or disheartening. And please welcome on stage the “I’m not talented enough” statement. They become a scapegoat, an excuse from taking a hard look at your goal and the effort it takes to get there.
“You want to make me extraordinary because it let’s you off the hook” — Lisa Nichols.
We have mystified talent and granted it a cleric role. If you have it, then you are special, if you don’t then there is nothing you can do about it because, well, it comes from above, or around, or from somewhere very special for sure.
To get the talented people to work, we made that “99% is work” more than percentage attributed to talent. This is sending a message to the gifted ones that aren’t willing to put in the work, that they’ll never be able to hit the full 100%. The “99%” is comfort for the people that aren’t considered talented. That extra unreachable 1% gives the talented ones the knighthood. And this is exactly how you create a game: you base it on scarcity! In reality, “talent” is a lottery game. We may consider now Monet talented, but for a large part in his career he wasn’t appreciated by his peers. Or what if we take one artist from an era and place it into another? It’s optics, values, beliefs.
Talent is a label not unlike those other known labels such as beautiful, smart, dumb, good and so on. It’s just so emended in our culture that we take it as fact. We buy into it, search for it, strive for it, recruit it, become it.
But never, ever, look closer at it.
