Today, motivational speakers and self-help books often urge us to follow our passions or “find your bliss.” For some, passion is seemingly the one single ingredient to personal fulfillment.
But while passion is absolutely vital, there is more to our genius: talent.
If passion is a way for energy to flow in, talent is how it flows back out into the world.
Talent is whatever comes to us naturally, the abilities at which we are good with little effort. In the 1997 film Good Will Hunting, the exceptionally bright protagonist Will tries to explain to his love interest how he understands organic chemistry and mathematics so easily. He likens his relationship to math and chemistry to how Beethoven might have looked at a piano. When it comes to those fields, he “could always just play.”
This is another way of saying that he has exceptional talent in these fields, just as Beethoven had exceptional talent in playing and composing music on the piano. Math and chemistry seem to just come to him naturally without much effort.
Notice that talent in this sense does not necessarily imply passion. Will is not saying he loves math and chemistry. In fact, in the scene, he seems more focused on going to the batting cages.
If passion is our fuel, talent is more like the vehicle into which we put our fuel. It determines what terrain we can best navigate. If we have a road bike, we can move with great speed on the pavement. If we have a mountain bike, we can go on dirt trails. If we have snowshoes, we can go up through the mountaintops.
Our effort is the volume of outflow. Our talent is the efficiency of that effort, how far a given amount of effort can carry us.
Like passions, everyone has innate talents. Everyone has unique abilities at their disposal at which they “could always just play.” And they are usually where our contribution to the world comes most easily.
This is an excerpt from my upcoming book The Antihero’s Journey: From Burnout to Real Contribution in Polycrisis Times. To read other excerpts, go here.
