HUNGER > TALENT
EPISODE 021: HUNGER > TALENT
It’s easy to look at the creative life and chalk it all up to a matter of talent, but the most wildly creative and productive people have something better: hunger. Let’s talk about it.
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FULL TRANSCRIPT
When Leonard Cohen died on November 07, 2017, the world lost an extraordinary human being, a man of depth and warmth, whose music and poetry was all at once spiritual, political, sensual, and deeply personal. I never got to see Cohen in concert, though his Live in London album is about as good as it gets. He’s connected with his audience, gracious, generous, warm and at ease. His golden voice never better, and his presence showing no echoes of his first concert appearance, 41 years previous, when he couldn’t get his guitar in tune, had to borrow one, and walked off the stage not once but twice before getting through one song, finally coming back on for a third time and finishing that one song, Suzanne. There’s no way to spin it, he was a wreck and I’m certain if we were in the audience we’d be thinking, like so many people have wrongly thought prematurely about us, don’t give up your day job, Leonard.
Who we become, and what our creative work becomes, is often so different from how it starts. The beginnings often show no promise at all, but it’s often at the beginning we judge it the most mercilessly and from those judgements decide whether we should or shouldn’t continue. So if our initial efforts are such poor evidence, how do we know whether or not to keep going? At what point do we see the writing on the wall and just chuck it all and turn our attention to something else, something we might be better at? And what do we do with the the judgements of others and ourselves in evaluating our talent?
I’m David duChemin, and this is episode 21 of a Beautiful Anarchy, let’s talk about it.
Music / Intro
I find it interesting that in the world of the arts and creativity, so much praise and attention is given to the rare genius and the prodigy, and, probably more likely, those who appear to be so. We look at people for whom every effort comes easily and turns to gold, and we say things like, "I wish I were that talented.” But I’d like to see a timeline for every person about whom we say such things. I’d like to see the messy beginnings and the false starts that, in those moments, might have seemed like clear signs of a distinct lack of talent.
It is said, though I think we forget it too often, that the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. In other words, just because the signs don’t point to you being brilliant at what you feel called to, especially at the beginning, doesn’t mean it’s proof you’re not. In fact too often we look to the wrong evidence, entirely. Steve Jobs, Oprah, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, they all dropped out of college. Not exactly promising beginnings or strong evidence for what was to come. Walt Disney was once fired from a Missouri newspaper for “not being creative enough.” J.K. Rowling was rejected by 15 publishers before Harry Potter found someone to take a chance on it. The classic book, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, was rejected 121 times. I can’t even imagine the persistence it took to submit it that 122nd time. Steven King’s Carrie was rejected 30 times. In his book “On Writing” King describes an adolescent version of himself pounding a nail into his bedroom wall on which he began to hang his rejection letters, when the nail gave out from the weight of so many rejections, he replaced it with a spike and kept writing. On the face of it these so-called failures don’t look promising. It would be easy to see them not only as a lack of evidence pointing to talent, but as strong evidence of the opposite.
It would be very hard to argue that any of the people I just mentioned don’t have a certain talent for the work they do. But it was clearly never talent alone that got them where they ended up. Talent is about what we CAN do, but effort is what we do to deploy those talents. Part of that effort, perhaps the largest part, lies in the not giving up. Not giving up on the thing we want to do, but also not giving up on the process of discovering what we can do especially at the beginning when we have no mastery over our tools, when we’re still exploring the edges of that talent. Early efforts can look like a lack of talent, and can be misleading if the dodgy first attempts, and the resulting apparent failures, put us off the chase.
Talent matters, it’s very clear that some people are just better at some things than others. While my math skills are next to non-existent, I do have a proclivity for language and writing and making pictures. I’ve known it for a long time, but my elementary school teachers would never have seen it. I was a mess. Like Leonard Cohen getting on stage for the first time, you’d never have seen so much as a hint of talent or natural ability back then. It had to be coaxed out.
I wish we were more nuanced about how we define and quantify talent. I think we’d all be so much better off if we talked more about the combination and mix of abilities, rather than in binary terms. Talent exists on a spectrum and there are no winners or losers. It’s not a “you have it or you don’t” kind of thing. Like creativity is not about whether you are or are not creative, we all are, but HOW we are creative differs from one person to the next, so talent is about how you are talented, not whether you are or not. What combination of abilities and inclinations are part of you, and what do you DO with that? A mere proclivity isn’t the same thing as mastery and refinement and execution. What ability I have to write, for example, will be very different after I’ve been at it for 60 years than it was when I started at 14. Talent is nothing more than a seed. I have this feeling we all have a combination of those seeds within us and it’s the ones we water and trim and give the most attention to, that will one day bear the most fruit.
Seeing talent as a specific thing you either have or don’t and which is blindingly obvious from the start has, I think, done more harm than good to otherwise incredibly talented people, the ones whose talent shows up in unlikely combinations, and needs unconventional ways of expression and honing. I think that’s why school was so harmful to some of us. They just didn’t know what to do with the particular mix of abilities and interests that make up our talents, no tidy box into which they could put us. And as we felt more and more like we didn’t belong in those tidy boxes we felt more and more like something was wrong with us, that we lacked talent. Some of us still feel like the square peg in the round hole.
None of us lack talent, though it’s abundantly clear that many of us possess it in some unusual combinations and because no one really knew what to do with that, or how to encourage us in that, we went out on stage, found it scary and awkward, and decided we had no talent for it. And then–unlike Leonard Cohen going back on stage again, and then again–we stayed in the wings and decided we’d read the signals wrong, that the hunger and the longing had pointed us in the wrong direction. And we never went out on stage again, robbing ourselves of the only thing that could have made us, eventually, really good at the thing we love, and that’s doing it.
So what’s the difference between those of us who eventually recognize that talent and do something with it, and those who don’t? Well for some of us it was an early voice or influence that saw us for who we were and they called those things forward in us and gave us a place to safely fall down and be awkward while we found our legs. For some it was voices that actively discouraged those things and eventually blinded us to who we are or might become. For most of us it’s probably a weird mix of both.
The way some glues attach to one surface better than another, I think being told as a kid (or even now as an adult) that you suck at something is remarkably sticky on our souls and minds, and it stays with us a long time, mostly I think because often those voices are right, and the words have a ring of truth to them. At the beginning many of us do suck at the things we’re trying to do. Baby Giraffes suck at walking for the first few moments, but man do they get their legs quickly. We get out legs pretty fast when we’re uninhibited, most especially when it’s something for which we have a natural inclination. But it’s almost never so fast that someone doesn’t see the first efforts and call them out for the awkward thing they are. And because we ourselves have just been thinking we suck at it, we close the box on the talents about to show themselves.
Forget talent and the effort to measure it out, to confirm it or find proof of its absence. What matters, I think, is the hunger. That you want to do it. That you need to do it. That it brings joy, that you love the chase and the challenge. It’ll be some mix of that. What does not matter is the kind of reaction you get at first (or frankly, ever) - I mean, it's nice if it’s positive, but it’s mostly irrelevant if not. In fact early feedback and judgement in either direction can take the fire out of our motivation, and that’s what it’s about: the fire.
I don’t think it matters how good you are, how talented you think you might be. I think it matters how hungry you are. How determined. How willing you are to walk back on stage. How much you love what you do, not how much others love it. Forget talent. Let that be a thing you decide looking back on your life, if at all.
Instead, feed the hunger. Stoke the fire. Something in Leonard Cohen wanted to be a singer, and he kept at it, despite scathing reviews and early evidence to the contrary. It doesn’t matter if you’re listening to this and don’t share my love for Cohen and think, “they were right, he was a terrible singer.” Your assessment doesn’t matter at all. Not to Cohen. He sang. And those that love him, love him deeply. He had impact and a life in music. And he followed his longing, and fed the hunger.
In the 2002 movie, Adaptation, Nick Cage plays twin screenwriters in what is arguably his only truly remarkable role as an actor. There’s this wonderful scene at the end where the twins, Charlie and Donald are talking and Charlie’s being kind of mean to Donald, tells him he was always kind of oblivious, and tells him about this time when Donald was in high school and so in love with this girl, Sarah Marsh, just head over heels, but he never knew she had no interest in him, never knew that this girl made fun of him behind his back. Donald says, “I knew. But I loved Sarah. It was mine, that love. I owned it. Even Sarah didn't have the right to take it away. I can love whoever I want.” Charlie says, "But she thought you were pathetic.” Donald replies, "That was her business, not mine. You are what you love, not what loves you. That's what I decided a long time ago.”
I think the idea that no one gets to decide what we love is an important one.
Forget the word “talent”, it has come to mean things it doesn’t. Talent didn’t give Leonard his career on the stage. Sure the seed was there, but what gave Leonard that gift of a life in music was what he did with that talent. It was his perseverance, and his willingness to follow the fire in his belly. Not everyone loves Cohen. His reviews were, at times, truly bad. But he didn’t let others decide what he loved. And he kept at it.
You’re not alone in wondering if you’ve got any real talent, or if that talent stacks up against others. You’re not alone in wondering if the stage fright is just a sign that you’re not cut out for this, whatever this is. And you’re certainly not the only person who has put their hand to something they want so badly to do, only to find it harder than they thought it would be. You’re not the only one to wonder how long it’s going to take to get your legs under you. This isn’t just about the big picture, either, but about any of the work you do, each new project begins the same way and needs time to get over the stage fright and the awkwardness, time to grow, refine, become. Sometimes all we have is that hunger and love.
Talent is a seed. It’s a possibility. But it’s not a replacement for rigor, and sometimes just dogged determination. Only the effort makes it shine, shows its promise for what it is. The question isn't “how talented are you?” but how hard are you willing to work to uncover or refine those basic abilities and proclivities, how open are you to the idea that you might not be remotely brilliant at one thing but that being pretty good at a combination of 3 unlikely things is even better, and that ten years from now you’ll have polished that weird combination to a spectacular shine, that even you couldn’t have guessed at, never mind the critics blinded by their myopathy.
I have a feeling that the most wildly creative people you know don’t feel especially talented. But they do feel hungry. Feed the hunger. Trust it. Follow the spark. And because it’s only in doing what you love for what might be a very long time before it becomes the thing you hope for it, don’t let anyone decide what you get to love.
Music in this episode: Acid Jazz (Kevin Macleod) / CC BY-SA 3.0