Grimby’s Gratitude – A Talent of Skill

the E-Newsletter of Goldeen ogawa • Issue 10, September 2018

Originally posted for Patrons on September 7 on Patreon

What have I done?

Written: The first draft of Driving Arcana 29/4.2: “One-Half Arcana.”
Art: Driving Arcana Wheel 2 Cover. (HOLY COW FINALLY)
Published: Professor Odd Episode 12: “Cerberus Retired”!

What am I doing?

Writing: Blogs and related ephemera. Professor Odd 18/3.6: “The Last Voyage of the Odyssean”
Art: Personal work – Pluto and Charon equines
Publishing: Apsis Fiction Mesohelion 2018.

Where am I going?

~~This very~~ Last weekend I am was at Rose City ComicCon in Portland, OR! Artist Alley R-09!

A Talent of Skill

It’s an awful thing, really, to say someone is talented. Oh, not that it’s a bad thing to be, but that it’s so often misapplied to a person’s skill rather than their inherent talent, and it is this misapplication that rubs my nerves like the business side of a cheese grater.

First let us define these two terms.

Merriam-Webster.com defines talent as “1 a: a special often athletic, creative, or artistic aptitude; b: general intelligence or mental power” (and 2: an archaic form of measurement but that’s beside the title).

I want to draw attention to the word aptitude here, because it’s key to understanding the difference between talent and skill.

Talent is an aptitude. It’s an affinity. A natural inclination. Essentially, something a person has got through no effort on their part aside from the fact that they continue to breathe and live.

Back to Merriam-Webster, which defines skill as “1 a: the ability to use one’s knowledge effectively and readily in execution or performance; b: dexterity or coordination especially in the execution of learned physical tasks and 2: a learned power of doing something competently : a developed aptitude or ability” (underlines my own).

Skill is your developed ability. It can be enhanced by developing it in an area in which you are already talented, but talent is not a prerequisite.

The mistake I see (well, hear) a lot of people make is conflating skill with talent. They mean well. Most of the time when I hear this, it is people attempting to give me a genuine compliment.

“You’re so talented!” I hear with frequent regularity. Until recently this was exclusively in response to my artwork, but lately it’s also been used to describe my calisthenics, and hilariously, my swimming.

The problem is that what they are really seeing is not my talent, but my skill. I am a talented artist, but my talent is in the enjoyment I take from making art, the deep, visceral satisfaction I feel upon the completion of a novel.

What people see is my skill. The result of hours and days and months and years of hard work and practice. Maybe talent got me started, but I did not draw horses like I do now when I was four. When I was four I was drawing horses, and I kept drawing horses, and I developed a certain skill at it.

So when people praise my talent, I have to run it through a quick translation filter otherwise it’s a real backhand of a compliment. Because it’s never my talent that they’re actually praising. They are praising the fact that I painted an owl in flight and got the feathers right. And that ain’t talent: it’s years of practice. It’s skill.

I don’t know where this preference for the word talent comes from. I seldom use it when I wish to deliver a compliment— because what I am usually complimenting is a person’s skill, and so that is the word I use. Maybe I’ll use “talent” in conjunction, if applicable: a lot of skilled artists and athletes are also talented. But here’s the catch: some of us aren’t. Some of us dragged these skills kicking and screaming uphill in the snow against the grain of our souls in order to get them. And to call a person who has done that, to any degree, talented, is not a compliment at all. Not even in translation.

Language is tricky. We talk automatically and can easily say things we don’t mean. It’s possible to change our habits, but that takes practice. And practice, as we all know, is hard. Which I think is another reason it’s so important to practice praising a highly developed ability for what it is: some madly impressive skill.

If we all practice long enough, we’ll even become skilled at that!