It doesn’t matter if you’re born with amazing skills and you’re the smartest on the planet because talent is overrated. There are other things more important that you should take into consideration if you really care about how well you develop yourself as a valuable individual.
The thing is, people will always try to kill your talent for various reasons. Maybe they don’t understand what you do. Maybe they are envious and don’t want to see you doing well. Maybe they simply don’t like what you are doing.
As I said, various reasons.
Having this in mind, let’s say you are born with a beautiful voice and you sing amazingly. And because people are mean, it won’t matter to them how beautifully you sing. They’ll only care about pushing you down.
If you don’t know your value and don’t have a purpose, it’s going to be too easy for others to stop you from sharing your talent with the world.
Talent is overrated and has always been promoted as the main thing behind success
The more you look back in time, the more you’ll realize how important talent was for being successful. Not anymore.
Recently, I’ve found this episode of Jordan B Peterson’s Podcast where Akira the Don was invited and they share that, if you want to be successful at the present moment, you have to invest 15-16 hours of work every day. Which means talent is no longer the main element for success.
Moreover, while working there are so many aspects you should focus on. If you have a beautiful voice, training it every day it may not be enough. You may have to learn how to promote yourself through various digital platforms (LinkedIn, YouTube, Facebook, and so on) and learn how to communicate your ideas properly (use the right words to describe your work).
We are in a point where personal branding is the most powerful tool one can have access to. And if you can master your personal brand, you’ll be able to have a business around yourself, without it feeling like a business but more like a lifestyle with tremendous financial independence.
Success is what you do to make sure your talent keeps up with the market standards and, at the same time, success is how you deliver your talent to the market.
It doesn’t matter if you’re poor or rich. It doesn’t matter if you can or can’t do something. All that matters are the continuous work and the specific communication process between your work and your market.
After all, your talent is nothing without an income and it will die if you can’t focus on it because you have a 9-to-5 job. Even more, your talent is nothing if it’s known only to you, so make sure you share it with as many people as you can. Doesn’t it make you think that talent is overrated?
I still meet people who are, for example, amazing painters, but they keep their creations to themselves. Maybe they are too afraid to share their work or maybe they’ve been taught that the only way to be happy is to have a 9-to-5 job and follow the rules of society.
I encourage you to think differently and test your assumptions.
The importance of having an experimental mindset
Deciding to experiment in a specific direction is more important than just having a specific talent. At the same time, it’s more important than researching continuously for more and more information.
While having access to others’ points of view can be valuable, I believe having an experimental mindset is more insightful (it provides real and relevant data for your situation/direction) and more valuable for the learning curve.
When you decide that you want to share your talent with the whole world, you’ll probably don’t know what do to. And that’s where the experimental mindset will bring tremendous value to you.
And it’s important to start small.
Set yourself that you want to share a piece of your work every day for the next 30 days and see what’s happening. Analyze the results and then set yourself a rule (maybe something like ‘everything painting I share from now on will come with a 10-second song, so people will listen to music while admiring the painting’). And then analyze again and measure your results.
Having a feedback loop made around your work is going to help you better understand both what you are doing and who are the people interested in your work.
With love and optimism,
David