Skill vs. Talent

I was just running and while I was running I was thinking about Skill vs. Talent.  I mean by talent something you're born with, something you just know, and by skill something that you've learned through practice and experience and observation and study.  Actually I started off thinking about beauty vs. cuteness, with beauty being what you've got and cuteness being what you do with it consciously.  But I got distracted and ended up taking a personal inventory of my own skills and talents.  I don't think I'm very talented.  I'm not real skilled, either.  But I didn't especially worry about all that.  I was more looking at the arenas I function reasonably well in, and assessing whether it is because of skill, or talent, or both.

I'm not a talented sailor.  But I'm very experienced, and pretty interested, and, when motivated, highly coachable.  So I've become a pretty highly skilled sailor.

I think I'm a talented writer.  I'm learning to be a skilled writer.  That looks like a pretty steep hill.  I think I am skilled as an editor of other people's writing.  I'm not sure there's such a thing as being talented as an editor.

I'm a talented storyteller and teacher, in person.  I'm not particularly skilled.  So far, it's not been an aspiration, but it seems like a worthy one, now that I've uncovered it.  I'd like to learn the tricks of stage presence and body language better. 

I'm neither skilled nor talented athletically, as a runner or tennis player or ball thrower or catcher.  Once upon a time I might have been a talented swimmer, but I never built any skills.  All this walking and running and goal setting I've been learning to do has been about building skill in the absence of talent, and realizing that self-esteem can come from skill as well as from talent.

Intellectually, as a thinker, I'm more talented than skilled, and I'm perceptive enough to see that I've got neither the innate talent nor the discipline to build the skills to be a Great Mind.   

I'm both skilled and talented as a listener.  I have a natural curiousity and open-mindedness and friendly acceptance, and I've learned how to read people and reassure them and draw them out.

I'm a reasonably skilled cook and baker, without particular talent. 

I'm a reasonably talented draw-er (by which I mean sketches and cartoons and depictions) with very few skills. 

I've got some kind of natural talent for leading and organizing, some kind of social credibility and authority.  I am very unskilled.  I am beginning to learn some skills, but they can't come too soon. 

Comments

[Andy B]

Editing talent is the same thing as writing talent: ear. A sense of which words should go where and which ideas should go where. Only the skills are different. And writing is harder. Anyone who can write could learn to edit; anyone who can edit could learn to write if they were willing to work really, really hard.

[Bobby]

Are there some characteristics that are both skill and talent?

Are people born with humility or is that something that's learned or perhaps it's both?

For example, I have the ability to link information in my head and the great ability to gather information. Is this in my genes or did I pick it up?

However, I don't have the natural ability to determine people's feelings based on their body language, most people seem to have. It's something that I have to consciously concentrate on. Is my weakness inherent in who I am? Or was I just not properly educated when I was younger?

[pjm]

I was thinking about talent and skill this weekend. Thinking about what makes some professional runners different from me, beyond simply the level of work we do, and what makes me different from a runner like you. I don't think the other factor in running is skill, though; what one trains while running isn't skill, but a sort of physical capacity.

One of the reasons we can notice differences like that is because there's so much in common.