I think the phrase ‘Natural talent’ is an oxymoron. ‘She’s a natural mathematician’. Or footballer or pianist or linguist or cook or singer or painter or plasterer or dancer – the domains in which ‘natural’ talent exists appear to be unlimited. I wonder if you can be ‘naturally’ talented at air traffic control: ‘Gosh, have you seen the way Ermintrude controls that air traffic? She’s a natural!’
Why do many people believe in ‘natural’ talent? I think the idea of ‘natural’ talent speaks to our emotions; it feels right and we want to believe it. Also, it’s a convenient label to be able to assign – don’t underestimate the importance of convenience. And there’s ignorance – ignorance often plays it’s part in bolstering beliefs for which the foundations are flimsy.
The Cambridge Dictionary offers this definition of talent: ‘(someone who has) a natural ability to be good at something, especially without being taught’. For ‘natural’, the Oxford Languages definition is: ‘existing in or derived from nature; not made or caused by humankind’.
But I know there’s more to it than that. We see a football match being played by 22 wildly-enthusiastic 7 year-olds, and one stands out: he dribbles past everyone at will – ‘he scores when he wants to’ as the song on the terraces goes. I knew a boy at school who often did his maths homework differently from the rest of us; he would find different ways of getting to the ‘right’ answer. In every field of endeavour, there are people who stand out, because they’re much better at it than most of us; it just has to be ‘natural’ talent, doesn’t it?
Putting those two together, you get something like: a natural ability to be good at something, that is derived from nature.
‘Natural’ talent does not appear to me to be able to bear the weight of serious scrutiny. If we take football again (I love football!), here are some questions that pop into my head when I hear about a ‘naturally’ talented footballer:
⁃ Do you mean that their high level of skill comes from nature? So it was already there from birth? Like a football talent seed. Planted in there. If it was ‘planted’, whereabouts in the brain was it planted?
First of all, if ‘talent’ is a natural endowment, as described by the dictionary definitions – however come by – than we don’t need to say ‘natural’ talent; the word natural is redundant. Second, if we mean by ‘natural’ talent a capacity that is innate, how could we know this? Can we look inside a just-born infant’s brain and observe their ‘natural talent’ for singing/dancing/piano/writing/crochet and so on? No, we can’t.
Mozart was a child prodigy, but read his story: tutored with almost religious zeal from the age of 2, by the age of 5-6, he had already accumulated thousands of hours of deliberate practice. So, of course he was already miles better than everyone else his age, and most other people besides. When we see that prodigious level of talent in action, it is easy to conclude that it can only have come about through ‘natural’ endowments; in fact, in Mozart’s case it was largely – if not wholly – the result of massive, deliberate practice over years.
The story of the golfer, Tiger Woods, is very similar. You can read both of their stories in Matthew Syed’s book, ‘Bounce’.
My main point about talent is NOT that I know that there is no ‘natural’ component to anyone’s talent. Indeed, we do inherit things from our parents and there are clearly advantages gained through inherited physical characteristics. In his book, ‘The Sports Gene’, David Epstein showed that inherited characteristics play an important part in elite performance in many sporting activities. Epstein pointed out that if you are a North American male aged 20-40, and you are 6 feet 3, the odds that you’ll be playing professional basketball are around one in two hundred thousand. If you are seven feet tall, the odds are one in six. And apparently American major-league baseball batters have extraordinary eyesight: a typical major-league batter can see at twenty feet what the average person can only see at eleven feet. Physical inheritances can play their part in talents that are physical, but my main point here is that we just can’t know whether, or the extent to which, ‘natural’ endowments have contributed to a person’s subsequent ‘talent’ in most domains – like maths, and drawing, and physics and languages and crochet.
So let’s just not go there. How does it help children and young people to be told that they are, or someone else is, ‘naturally’ talented at maths or drawing or physics or crochet? It doesn’t. Much better for us all to hold and promote the view that talent is the result of a lot of deliberate practice over time. Much better, surely, for a young person to be told by us all: ‘How well you have done, because of how hard you’ve worked! Practice pays off!’
‘Talent’ is about performance levels. Lionel Messi is a hugely ‘talented’ footballer: he has performed at a very high level for many years. Unarguable, and easily measurable. Is his footballing talent ‘natural’? Was he born a talented footballer? I think not, but I can’t be sure, and the point is that whether he was or not matters not at all.
There’s no issue at all with talking about talent – it exists, it’s all around us – but let’s not talk about ‘natural’ talent; let’s talk instead about talent as something that is developed through deliberate, sustained practice over time. Our students and our children will thank us for it.
