The Curse of Talent
When a country has natural resources like oil, gas, and metals, and relies on the revenue from exporting these materials instead of being innovative and productive, this would lead to an unsustainable economic situation, low economic growth rate, high inflation and low levels of prosperity. In economics, this situation is called the curse of resources. You can’t substitute good work with an external resource that is given to you without any effort and then expect brilliant sustainable results.
If we consider a person as the country, what would be the natural resources in this analogy? I think talent and family wealth are good examples of external resources of a person. I am going to write about talent and describe a situation that a person is cursed by her/his talent.
You might be able to deny the role of talent in success, but I guess nobody ignores the existence of different talents. Talents are real, they are categorized and there are standard gauges to measure their level. If you think there isn’t such a thing as talent, I recommend not wasting your time reading the rest of the article. I believe in it not just because of scientific facts, but also because of the many talented people I’ve met in my life.
Talented people seem fantastic at first. You give them a task or problem and they can overcome it much sooner than a normal person. Normal people should practice a music note for several weeks to be able to play it well, but a genius guitarist does that in a few hours. Everything is good and you are shocked by this ingenuity. Do you know what happens next? Our genius guitarist becomes trapped in his talent. He doesn’t work hard cause he knows he is much better than the average without any serious effort. So he wouldn’t ever go beyond that. he is stocked at a just above average level and never reach a top level.
This is a sad story. I have seen a lot of people like that. Intelligent people usually lack self-discipline. They were never forced to practice determination because they were usually good enough without any effort, but the life goals and challenges are not always that easy. When these talented people are on a challenging growth path that talent wouldn’t work without perseverance, they fail.
Talented people usually hadn’t a strict mentor to teach them the diligence. Nobody has ever made them work hard. They lack the essential capabilities to create brilliant results. This is what I call the curse of talent.
If you are one of those cursed by their talent, it’s all up to you to free yourself. There is no savior out there, do you want to save yourself?
