• PeteWheeler@lemmy.world
    0·
    2 months ago

    Talent is hard to define. In my opinion talent = unobserved practice/study.

    This picture gets the concept across pretty well. But it can also happen with kids that “happen” to be good at something. Like sports. Was that kid a natural at baseball, or did he just watch a lot of baseball games and played backyard baseball a shit ton so he just knew the rules/strats before any of the other kids?

    Some people learn faster than others yes, but learning in itself is a skill.

    Maybe this isn’t true, but it is definitely 100% more effective than assuming talent is outside of your control or an obstacle that can not be cleared.

    • bpev@lemmy.world
      0·
      2 months ago

      Reminds me, Malcom Gladwell’s “Outliers” book had a section about his interesting observation that pro hockey players birthdays are skewed to the earlier months of the year. He attributed that to a kind of butterfly effect:

      1. youth hockey leagues set league cutoffs by age
      2. the slightly older kids are bigger and stronger
      3. because they do better at the beginning, they get more playing time, more encouragement, maybe go to more “all-star” kind of things, where they might get extra coaching
      4. eventually those kids actually just are better, because they had a better environment to grow.

      I mean idk how accurate this exact instance is, but I feel it’s a good thought experiment in thinking of how seemingly insignificant parts of the environment can impact whatever talent is. The whole nature vs nurture thing.