I’ve Played the Piano for 15 Years. Here’s What to Do When You’re Not Feeling Talented

What I learned by being the shadow of someone 4x more gifted than me.

Collage by Loudt Darrow

For seven years of formal piano education, I was the untalented shadow of the golden boy, Victor.

He was ten, two years younger than me, four times a better performer. It didn’t help that his name is the Latin for “winner” and mine starts with the big L. He was chubby and short, but with the genetic inheritance of two musician parents. Call it a collab.

Hearing him boast about the grand piano he had in his living room, you would’ve thought he was just a prick.

But as hard as it was for me to admit it, his talent had nothing to do with DNA chains or expensive musical furniture.

It had to do with effort — the lack of it.

“Play more relaxed,” my teacher Sonia would tell me. With an annoyed emphasis on “relaxed,” like at some point, she began to doubt whether if I knew the meaning of that word.

I knew the dictionary definition of “relaxation,” but this ain’t Countdown. You don’t get any points if, every time you play, your fingers get all stiff and unbending like a cat spooked by a cucumber.

And then I’d watch Victor’s performance. It was effortless. His fingers bounced all over in a gracefully coordinated ballet.

Talent is when you can make difficult things appear effortless.

As I was constantly getting overshadowed by Victor, I got interested in the lives and routines of extraordinary people. I figured that if I don’t have a special gift, I may as well pretend I have one.

That is, by copying the rituals, the mindsets, and the habits of talented folks.

Or are you going to tell me you’ve never read an article about Elon Musk? We all dive into their lives and minutiae hoping it’s contagious. I wanted it all: the morning routine of Einstein, the reading list of Bill Gates, the da Vinci code.

Except for that last one, which turned out to be a novel, nothing worked. But we all knew this deep down: knowledge alone won’t do. That effortless sway we call talent doesn’t come from what we know.

Talent comes from what we can do.

I can tell you the secret to become a virtuoso concert pianist right now: just press the right buttons in the right order.

And that is the not-so-obvious gap between “knowing something” and “being able to do something with it.” The space between knowledge and skill is a cosmos.

One that you’ve travelled before yourself.

You know how you can walk straight, talk out loud, or drive a car, all the while daydreaming about how stupid you were for not buying Bitcoin back in 2011? Those are maddeningly complex activities. You coordinate 200 muscles just to take a single step forward. More than a hundred go into saying “I suck ass at piano” out loud.

You can do them without thinking — effortlessly.

But the thing is, no one can teach you how to do them.

If that was an option, we would hand 1-year-old kids a pamphlet with instructions on how to walk and talk, and by the end of the weekend, they’ll be doing the laundry and answering phone calls.

Skill translates into effortless action. But one brain can’t transfer its skill to a second brain.

I knew about “relaxation,” but I had never felt it. I didn’t have the skill. And it’s not like my teacher could unscrew a couple of bolts in my skull, hook up some jumper cables from hers to mine, and give me the spark of competence I needed.

Eventually, I went down the only path for “getting talented.”

Now, more than a decade after those awkward early years in music, I know what “relaxation” feels like. I have the sway. And I’d bet my blond fringe that every musician has had this conversation before.

Person who’s heard me play: “Whoa, you’re so talented! How do you do it?”
Me: “Practice.”
Person: “You must have some kind of gift, you know?”
Me: “It’s just a lot of practice, really.”
Person: “I wonder if your mum played you Mozart while you were in her womb…”
Me: “The 3 hours of practice every day could’ve been an influencing factor too.”
Person: “I could never do that, I don’t have any talent…”
Me: “It’s just practice.”

That was Victor’s only secret. It took me a while to stop looking for shortcuts and accept that a grand piano in your living room, if you don’t use it to practice, is just a very expensive dining table.

Back in those conservatoire years, Victor would sit at his grand piano for 2–4 hours every day. I would play video games and maybe stare at my electric Clavinova for half an hour.

And that’s why “talented” people are so damn scarce.

Because no one wants to practice.

We prefer to waste money and time looking for books, courses, hacks, mentorships, expensive gear — anything that looks like a peaceful way out of the pain of practice.

But unless we are cross-bred with an alien race, or invent some cyberpunk technology that dramatically alters how our brains learn, then practice is the one and only path to talent.

In the end, everything we do is just a group of neurons firing together. Every time we do something, those connections change. The more we do, the stronger the connections grow. So the only way to learn to do is by doing.

Not even the greatest geniuses of all time could skip practice.

Sure, it’s hard to look at da Vinci, Mozart, or Elon Musk, and not wonder whether we should even take part in this little wack experiment called “humanity.”

But the fact that those three geniuses are 300 years apart from each other should tell you they are rare. But not “rare” because one of them has his name in the title of a bestselling novel, despite not even starring in it.

They are rare because of their maddening commitment to practice from a very early age.

Da Vinci would steal paper from his father’s desk and go to the forest to paint every day. Mozart cried when his father carried him out of the piano bench when he was only four. Elon was reading the Encyclopedia Britannica with only nine.

Are you feeling untalented?

Practice, my friend.

To get that clumsiness out of your system, to shut your inner voice’s toxic comments, or simply to get revenge on the prick that told you that you sucked — practice.

Whatever your craft, art, or business is, practice is how you change your brain. Practice is how you make extremely difficult things appear effortless. And when your dedication finally pays off and someone approaches you and tells you how talented you are, you can tell them the secret.

It’s just practice.