When you see a great athlete or musician or mathematician, do you think “wow, they’ve got talent!”? You may wonder how some people – other people – got their talent. I mean surely they have some innate gift that allows them to be so good at what they do, right?

You, on the other hand, couldn’t throw a ball or play an instrument or calculate a square root if your life depended on it. After all, you’ve got no talent.

This is complete and utter bullshit.

The only reason those folks can do what they do is because they spent a lot of time practicing and improving themselves. We get a glimpse of this when sportscasters do the stories of Olympic athletes. They’ll tell about how the person spent 4 hours every morning before work practicing and training. Then, after they were done working, they spent another 4 hours training. And if they’re lucky enough to not have to work, they’ll spend 10-12 hours per day training and practicing.

If you spent 10-12 hours a day on something every single day for years on end, you’d get good at it too.

As I’ve mentioned elsewhere, I play piano. I’ve been playing for over 30 years. I’m pretty good at it, but I’m not Carnegie Hall skill level. Why? Because at best I practice for an hour or two a day. It’s enough to make me better than a lot of people, but not enough to get me to that elite level of musician. And I’m fine with that. It doesn’t mean I have talent, and it doesn’t mean I don’t either. It just means that I’ve reached the level I’ve reached based on the amount and type of practice I’ve put in over my life so far.

If I suddenly decided that I really wanted to perform at Carnegie Hall, then my strategy for practice would change. I’d put in more time practicing each day. I’d also work on improving things that I’m less than perfect at today. I’d probably also spend money on a piano coach.

If you still believe that you either have talent or you don’t, then you have what Dr. Carol Dweck refers to as a fixed mindset. With a fixed mindset, anything that is a challenge is something to be avoided. If you can’t solve that problem immediately then it’s proof that you’re a failure and should just quit.

The opposite of a fixed mindset is a growth mindset. With a growth mindset you believe that problems are simply challenges you haven’t yet understood enough to conquer. You’re missing something, but you can learn it. Failures are simply a way of knowing that you haven’t learned enough yet and you need to keep going.

But what about people who spend lots of time on things yet never seem to improve? There’s another piece of the puzzle. Some people call it “deliberate practice” where you work on the skills that you’re still improving. The opposite of that is just repeating the things you’re already good at over and over and not gaining any new or improved skills in the process.

Getting back to my piano playing. If I learned how to play Twinkle Twinkle when I was six, and then never learned anything else, would it really matter if I played that every day for 8 hours a day? How could I possibly improve my playing if I don’t try anything new?

Fortunately, that’s not what I do with my piano playing. On the other hand, I also do sudoku puzzles on my phone. I got to level 10 of 16 on those about 5 years ago, and I haven’t bothered to get any better. I’m at a plateau and I’m fine with that. Not everything you do needs to keep being taken to the next level.

You’ve probably heard of the 10,000 hour rule. That’s the rule that says you need to practice something for 10,000 hours in order to become an expert in it. There is some debate on the value of 10,000 hours. Some say you only need 5,000 hours. Others say it might be more like 20,000.

Personally, I think a lot of that depends on the type of effort you put in during the time spent. I’m sure I’ve spent more than 10,000 hours playing piano over the past 30 years. And while I’m pretty good, I’m by no means an expert. Yet there are other people who spent half that time playing and are far better than I am.

My 10,000 hours have been a mix of playing for enjoyment along with playing to improve my skills. There have also been gaps where I haven’t played for months at a time. When that happens, my skills go down and I have to spend time getting back to where I was before I stopped playing.

This mean it’s not just putting in the time, it’s the quality of time you put in that makes you the expert or not. Becoming an expert is a conscious effort.

Where does this leave us with talent? In my opinion, it’s overrated. If you told me that I’m talented because of my piano playing skills, or my writing skills, or my software development skills, or any of the skills I have as a result of spending a lot of time practicing, I’d probably just smile and nod. But on the inside I’d be thinking, “you have no idea what I went through to get to where I am now.”

Sometimes though, I’ll be a bit more blunt about it. Especially if you said something like “I wish I could do that.” I’d answer, “you can. You just need to spend the time practicing like I did.” And it’s true. If you really want to become a skilled piano player then you need to stop whining about lack of talent and go get yourself a keyboard and an instruction book and maybe a teacher and start practicing every single day.

But if you think that it’s all just talent, then you’ve given up before you’ve even started.