I guess the author knows exactly that talent exists but wants to point out that the word is used often in situations where diligence was more appropriate.

I'm tired of articles and blog posts like that. They give a strawman-ish definition of (say) "expert" and then claim that "experts don't exist" or "we don't need experts".

That might sum it all up in a shorter way.

Talent is not bullshit. It's just not enough to either make you succeed or make you fail.

You can't argue with the fact that some people are naturally talented at certain things. Whether that comes through practice or genetics depends on which things you're talking about (I'd say that being a talented sportsman takes genetics as well as huge amounts of practice, and being tone-deaf precludes you from becoming a talented composer no matter how much you practice), but both are factors.

Talent without practice is nothing. Practice without talent is more than nothing. But that doesn't negate the existence of talent.

Exactly right. There is an undeniable genetic predisposition towards some skills. I'm sure everyone has any number of personal anecdotes they can tell. Anecdotes by themselves don't make something true, sure, but in large enough quantities they sure suggest it.

Play my friend any song twice and he'll give you a passable piano rendition straight away. His sister couldn't even whistle the tune. But she knows 6 languages and learns new ones for fun. He says learning a language is like trying to force a lego brick into his brain through his forehead. Everyone knows some situation like this. Talent is often obvious from birth and extremely potent.

As you say, talent without practise - and there's too much of that - is nothing. Many talented people become lazy and compacent and never realise their full potential. Many untalented people attain mastery of an art through sheer determination and effort. But geeze, talent exists all right.

There is an explicit reason for why I called my blog 'Apologetic Writing' (it's also explicitly not within the context itself...). Of course, I can see there is such a thing as talent, but I rather define it as a group of human perks, that you are either born with, or have early developed due to some events, that are boosted mostly by realizing their existence and overall meaning, and then sharpening every each and one of them with a lot of practice. I have a few "talents", or as I love to call them, groups of perks uniformly supporting an adjacent field of mastery. Mathematics, algorithmic thinking, art and linguistics. None of those develop seriously over time by themselves if I don't put any time onto the subject. I have proof of course. In the past year, after living my life with the knowledge that I can sketch OK, and even better than most people I know. I have lifted the skill by practicing more often than usually (on a daily basis I'd draw between 3-6 quick pencil sketches). Now, withdrawing a sketch from a couple of years ago and comparing it to one I would quickly sketch in less than 10 minutes, I can tell that I got better by much. "Many untalented people attain mastery of an art through sheer determination and effort. But geeze, talent exists all right." - I'd rather see more of those, than of the opposite (talented, but extremely lazy). One more thing, I thank you all for taking your precious time and reading my blog.

p.s - my gallery, if anyone wondered whether I can really draw or not, or is interested in monitoring my progress ;) http://case0thrives.deviantart.com/

Talent is often indicative of interest level. If you like something enough to do it a lot, you'll pick up skill much faster. Arguably, that's because when you innately understand the concepts behind something you're more interested in continuing.

Do you have any advice on how to learn to play by ear? I can play piano well, but figuring out a song from a recording is very difficult for me.

Without talent, you must practice. Take a song you don't know how to play, and start to figure it out from a recording. Once you've mastered that song, pick another one. There's no secret to any of this.

I've have no natural talent for music, but I put in the hours. When I was 16, I was cut from my high school musical for my inability to sing back a note played on the piano. I took voice lessons, got a few chorus roles, and kept working at it. Over the course of college, I got a few friends together and practiced a few hours a week. By the time I got to senior year of college, I got the lead in the play and was performing solos with my a capella group. These days, I sing with a barbershop quartet - understanding the harmonies there, let alone reproducing them, was unthinkable 5 years ago.

If you don't have the talent, you've got to work at it. It will pay off, I promise.

I would add a few more points: I forget the exact term, but be sure to engage in purposeful practice, always challenging yourself with a song just out of your reach. Start as easy as necessary and work up.

It would be helpful to do some songs that you can get the full score for, so you can do concrete validation of your correctness. However, be sure that they are the full, true score; grab a Guitar book of Beatles songs, for instance, and they're likely to be simplified in a way that won't help on this task.

This right here is worth repeating. Never pick something you're certain you can do. Go for things just out of your reach. Pick things that you're going to have to strain to do. Do this again and again, and every time you get a bit better.

Occasionally, attempt something far beyond your reach, just to remind yourself of what you're striving for.

I used to be in the same boat and was very frustrated by it as a child and young adult. Playing by ear comes down to training your brain to hear all of a piece of music, including what's not there but would fit nicely. An awful lot of people can only "hear" the melody, or the sopranos in the choir, or the famous guitar lick.

I've had about nine years of various music lessons but no formal ear training. So, the following advice is what I figured out myself, mostly in my thirties. It's geared a little more toward singing than playing, more toward arranging than original composing. You'll probably notice I don't have a terrific head for jazz. This advice shows my age (and my whiteness), but hey, sometimes old music is good music, sometimes old composers are good composers. Stand on the shoulders of giants, and all.

Advice (in approximate order of difficulty and creativity):

1) Give up air guitar. :-> You need to make your own noises.

2) Play and sing intervals and scales. Pick a note, any note, such as D. Start at D and jump up a 2nd, jump up a minor 3rd, jump up a major 3rd, etc. Jump down a 4th. Go up and down the major scale, the minor scale, the Spanish/Jewish scale, etc. Hum this stuff to yourself while you're driving or cooking or waiting to fall asleep. Also, hear these things in your head without making audible noise. You can work on your intervals and scales in your head while your significant other is asleep.

3) Sing the appropriate do-re-mi words to the notes of simple songs (major keys without accidentals). Listen to "Do-Re-Mi" from "The Sound of Music." I mean, the "do mi mi, mi so so" and "so do la fa mi do re" stuff toward the end. That's what you're going to do. For example, sing "Twinkle, twinkle, little star..." as "Do do so so la la so..." Your voice might be bad, but your brain is getting the hang of something new and interesting.

4) Play and sing chords. Pick a key, any key, such as D. Learn to play and hum the notes in the Dmaj, Dmin, Daug, Dsus, D6, D7, Dmaj7, D9, etc. chords. Hum broken chords as you go about your day, and work on them silently in your head when forced to sit through a PowerPoint presentation.

5) Hear, sing, and play bass lines. Listen to disco. I'm serious, listen to disco. A disco bass is prominent and follows nice patterns, and so this exercise is not too tough. Identify what the bass is doing and hum along, even if you need to do so one or two octaves higher. Memorize that bass line. Then play it on your piano. Play it in a different key if that's easier on your brain. Play it in different keys because that's hard on your brain. (Hint: "Funky Town" is much easier than "Disco Inferno," which is much easier than "You Should Be Dancing.") If you're having trouble with this, get a book of boogies and notice the patterns your left hand is playing. Then head back to those disco records. After disco, try the bass in other pop genres. It's usually not as loud and patternous, and sometimes it gets "lost" in power chords. Yes, "Day Tripper" and "Smoke on the Water" have famous bass licks, but the trick is hearing the bass throughout.

6) Hear, sing, and play vocal lines. Listen to the Everly Brothers, the Beatles, BeeGees, or some show tunes. Identify each voice in the recording and take turns singing along with the various voices, not just the melody or whatever vocal notes happen to be the highest. (Hearing the non-melody or the not-highest vocal can be especially tough.) Sit down at the piano and play those parts simultaneously. Graduate to barbershop quartet, doo-wop, the Beach Boys, and jazz vocal groups (Andrews Sisters, Pointer Sisters, Three Mo' Tenors, Manhattan Transfer, Take 6, etc.). Take a stab at someone like Rossini or Verdi (I find Puccini awfully hard to grok). You might have a lousy voice, or your playing might be awkward, but the point is your brain knows what's going on with all the vocals.

7) Imagine a given song done in a different style or time signature, even if all you can handle is the melody and you can only kind of, sort of imagine other parts and instruments. Examples: Neil Sedaka doing "Breaking Up Is Hard To Do" in two very different styles; "La Dona E Mobile" from "Rigoletto" (3/4 time) and the theme song from the "Lidia's Italy" cooking show (same melody in 4/4). Some years ago, I was singing something very bland in a choir, and I noticed my alto part was a doo-wop bass vocal sung an octave too high and in completely wrong rhythm. Oh, and it needed to be "Bubba da-boom, sha-boom..." instead of whatever my lyrics were. I spent the drive home imagining the whole shebang done as doo-wop, which helped me feel much better about that bland thing we were stuck with.

8) Hear the essential chord changes in recorded songs. Listen closely to folk, country, blues, early rock, Southern rock, or roots rock. These have a rather small number of essential chords, and they don't change all that often--even if a melody wanders all over, even if John and Paul are harmonizing all over, even if a guitar screams all over, even if Jerry Lee Lewis pounds keys all over. In fact, a few songs boil down to just one chord. If a song has acoustic guitar strumming, you're in luck because it's playing the essential chords, and you can easily hear when they change. Otherwise, listening to the bass comes in very handy: when the bass pattern changes, that's a chord change; when the bass hits a different low note, that's a different chord. You can verify the changes you're hearing by looking at printed music that shows the chords across the top.

9) Figure out the obvious chords that go with the simple songs you sang in kindergarten. I'm talking "Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star," "Jingle Bells," "The Hokey Pokey," "The Farmer in the Dell," and so on. Do this without listening to recordings. How? With a circle of fifths diagram. You know from listening to the songs in exercise 8 how often the chords are likely to change. So now the question is, just what are those chords? Pick a key, any key. Find it on the outside of the circle. These really simple Western songs in major keys always start with that chord, though not always on that note, "do," otherwise known as the tonic. "Twinkle" starts on the tonic (do), "Jingle" starts a third higher (mi), "Hokey" and "Farmer" start a fourth lower (so). Start hitting chords and singing along. When you sense a need for a chord change, head one or two steps clockwise or counter-clockwise around the outside of the circle. When you go up a fifth (the Wikipedia circle shows this as clockwise), you might want to play a 7th chord (minor 7th). When you go down a fifth (counter-clockwise) or return to your original chord, the basic chord will do (no 7th). Your chords on the diagram will remain very close to that first chord, and you will return to that first chord often. In fact, I guarantee you will end on it. These neighboring circle of fifths chords will sound "right" and obvious. You'll notice that rounds, such as "Three Blind Mice" and "Frere Jacques," don't have much going on. In slightly more advanced songs (off the top of my head, perhaps in the long "peace" in "Silent Night"), you will occasionally want to play the minor chord on the inside of the circle instead of the major chord on the outside.

10) Hear and identify the essential chords in recorded songs. Listen to those songs from exercise 8. Now you can hear the essential chords and identify them on the circle of fifths! Things get easier from now on. Play rhythmic chords with your right hand and the bass line with your left. As you play, sing the melody or invent a harmony. Now you're starting to cook. The fact that you're not playing all the notes you hear in the recording doesn't matter. What's important is, you're playing something that works. In fact, you can do a passable job in a garage band, especially if it has no bass player.

11) Listen to Christmas carols. Even if you're not a Christian--even if you're a hardcore Ayn Randian--listen to carols, especially the "religious" stuff from hymnals. The point is, you want to listen to a zillion different versions of the same ostensibly straightforward songs that have been around forever. Identify the essential chords you hear. Most versions use the "right" chords. (The Mormon Tabernacle Choir is "right.") Simon and Garfunkel's "Silent Night" is right but horrifying. A lot of versions are right-ish and funkified. Keep alert for versions which are "wrong" somehow. For example, Bruce Cockburn and Sam Phillips do an eerily wrong "It Came Upon a Midnight Clear" by changing the melody a bit and playing wrong chords. IIRC, it shows up in the WWII movie by the same name.

12) Play or sing one song (in a suitable key) while listening to a recording of a different song. Yes, it's doable, even if you need to do one of the songs a bit "wrong." This is called counterpoint, and it's something that used to amaze me when I was a little kid watching "The Carol Burnett Show." Steve Lawrence or someone would show up as a guest, and he and Carol would sing two different songs simultanously or interleaved. If you're too young to remember or can't get your hands on old Carol Burnett episodes, listen to "The Music Man," which contains several examples of counterpoint: "Lida Rose" with "Will I Ever Tell You?", "Seventy-six Trombones" with "Goodnight, My Someone," and "Pick a Little, Talk a Little" with "Goodnight, Ladies." For decades I wondered how anybody could possibly know which song fits with which. When my brain finally started hearing what chord progressions are suitable for what melodies, and how to be "wrong" but good, it became obvious. Oddly, I started out hearing U2 with other stuff, maybe because U2 is pretty simple. For example, if you zoom through "Bullet the Blue Sky" (with the shorter rap) it fits exactly into John Denver's "Wooden Indian." You can sing a wrongish rendition of "What a Friend We Have in Jesus" with "Love, Rescue Me." With some ingenuity, you can fit the Beatles' "A Day in the Life" (including the weird, climbing orchestra and the "ah"s) into "Numb" (then tack the giant piano chord onto the end). Etc. BTW, Collective Soul's "December" is almost the Doobie Brothers' "Black Water," and you can sort of sing Verdi's "Gloria all'Egitto" march in "Aida" to Richard Rogers' "How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria?" wedding march in "The Sound of Music." Pretty soon, if you've heard one song, you've heard them all, and they're all interchangeable.

13) Call yourself a musician. Find the cool people in your town, and join or form a garage band. You can do a passable job by now, which means, yes, you are a musician. You want your bandmates to be better musicians than you so that you keep growing. How do you find cool people, decent musicians? Well, you can hang out in coffee houses. You can mingle at the receptions and after parties following smallish-venue concerts. You can bring your instrument or voice to jam sessions at bars. Here's the thing: when someone says "Are you a musican?" or "You must be a musician," always say "Yes," even if you feel like a lying dork. Saying yes to the right people opens amazing doors. I've wound up playing in garage bands, creating orignal music arrangements for churches, and performing opera. Just keep calling yourself a musician.

Sorry I got long-winded here. But your question got me pacing the floor, and I had fun writing my answer.

"My friend" says that he has no idea. It just comes naturally and he's been able to do it since age 3.

Sorry ; )

Sing it. Then play the notes that match what you're singing.

Talent is the principal, practice is the interest rate.

Essentially, an extremely talented person starts out with $1,000,000; however, if they never practice it never becomes worth more than it is. Yet a relatively untalented person may start out with like $1,000, but if they practice for hours a day every day for years they'll be worth a lot more than a million dollars.

When I was about 6 my teacher told my parents that she suspected I was dyslexic. At 17 I got hired as a video game and movie reviewer. At about 19 I got a couple of short stories published and currently I'm working on a novel I hope to get published.

I don't believe I was ever particularly talented at writing, I'm a creative person, but it's never been one of those 'click' things, I've just wanted it all my life. Give me a hammer or a saw and I'll build you anything, I even worked as an electrician for a couple of years. I've put in stairs, I can plaster a wall as well as drywall, I can wire your house, plumb it and give you a gas line. When it comes to hands on work I can do virtually anything, but I've never had this ability with words or writing and I believe this lack of ability always made me try harder with it. Now I don't want to do anything other than write for a living; although I wouldn't mind taking Electrical Engineering, either for work purposes or for building a giant robot army to take over the world... you know which ever pays more.

The article is bullshit.

Not a single actor with Danny Devito's height and hairline earns half as much as Brad Pitt. Nor are there any Olympic medalist swimmers with small hands and feet. I can't think of any Fortune 500 members with Down Syndrome, either.

Hey Apologetic - interesting sentiment mate. Two thoughts on writing:

1. You've got some really interesting points, but there's some rambling around them. Edit like your life depends on it - cut words, cut words, cut tangential themes, cut sentences, cut, cut, cut. Favor less over more. Kill the weakest links in your piece. They won't be pissed.

You started with:

"* Thesis presentation * Examples * Reasons explaining why * Summary

Hello. I'll start off by stating that one of my pets died a couple of days ago, and I'm probably sucking half the energy required to write this blog post from the recent event's anguish."

Cool - lots of great writers start with just whatever to get going, and the good stuff follows. Then remember to cut it in the first round of edits, otherwise you risk losing a lot of readers out of the gate.

2. The more you use profanity, the less effective it gets. If you hold your profanity in reserve, you can really drive a sentiment home when you need to.

I'm sorry he thinks that way, because it's completely wrong. People aren't born equal...

Talent is what fuels the hit show "American Idol." People enjoy watching the contestants try and fail because they have no talent. It's a sad reality really... Sorry, but the decision was made when you were born. You either sing like a star, or you suck dawg!

Explain usain bolt.

This question of talent can be rephrased in another way: are humans the product of genetic selfish replicators alone? The answer seems to be no, that memetic replication has a role as well. If only genes were the factors in what makes a person "talented", then indeed, people could consider "talent" as the predictive factor in somebody's success. But we are not only gene replicators, we are also meme replicators, and therefore, our innate "talent" is not a sole predictor of our success. I could be for example genetically pre-disposed towards intelligence, but then if my mind becomes hijacked by one of the various religious memes out there, instead of using my innate, genetic intelligence for the benefit of man, I could for example use that intelligence towards constructing a dirty bomb, in slavish servitude to the meme of religious fanaticism which has infected me. So is "talent" bullshit? Yes and no. To the extent that we are determined by genes, no, talent is very real. To the extent that memes play a role however, talent can either be increased, decreased, or misdirected towards destructive ends.