Transcript: Is Your Talent Holding You Back?

Hey, creative is your talent holding you back? I didn’t say your lack of talent. I said, your talent, that thing that everybody’s told you your whole life, you’re, you’re good at, you’re naturally gifted at whatever the term they say. Did you know that your talent can actually hold you back? It can hinder you from success. It can slow you down. Uh, it’s actually pretty common, I think, and it’s happened with me. Tell me if this sounds familiar. You were told as a child or through high school, your art teacher, parents’, friends, whatever, that you were good at something. And it might have been painting or music or basketball, I don’t know, whatever it was. Writing. Writing was one of mine. And uh, so you grew up with this idea that you were somehow, naturally better at this thing, this skill than every other or most other human beings?

Probably true. But here’s the downside to that is if we, we believe that is that when we start to pursue that talent, we start to work on it or to try and get better at it. There’s a spot where you hit a challenge where, you know what? I’m not the best in the room anymore. <laugh>. Or, you know, if you go up in another league or you find a, if it’s music for instance, or painting is a technique that you wanna do that you just, you’re starting to struggle. Like, wait, hey, this is not coming easily to me. And because your whole life, you’ve, you’ve thought, oh, well I have talent, therefore this thing should be relatively easy for me. If it is not easy for me, I must not be as good as I thought I was. And that can hold you back. It can make you stop the, this happened to me with music.

I was a very musical kid and I had piano lessons. I started taking it eight years old. And I’ll be honest, I was very good. I was naturally talented at the piano. I just knew what to do with it. I wasn’t Mozart or anything, but, you know, I was really good. And I did that for about four years. And then I got to a teacher who really pushed me. I mean, she was, she was a looking back, she was a great teacher. And I got frustrated cuz I was talented and all of a sudden I was struggling and I wasn’t getting it the first time around. And I really had to practice to do well, and I didn’t do as great as I wanted to in recitals. And 12 year old Kevin said, well, if, if, well, I’ve always been told I’m talented at this, and if I am now struggling, I must not be as good as I thought.

And I got frustrated and I quit. I wouldn’t play baseball. And I regret that. To this day, it’s my largest, my number one regret that I quit piano. So I bring that up because I, I think there’s probably a lot of creatives out there. You’re, you are not pushing yourself past the boundaries you already have to past the boundary that says, when it gets hard for you, because we’ve lived inside talent. Talent’s a real thing. I believe in talent. I mean, it, it, it, it, you can be na more naturally gifted at something than other people around you. But there is always, always, when you get to the spot where you really want to excel, become world class, become professional at it, that not only will you struggle and hit those barriers and have to work through them, you should push through those and have those barriers.

Alex Hormoze, um, this great business guy and uh, speaker on YouTube, you should look him up, says th uh, you have to put in time under the bar. Now he’s a bodybuilder. He’s like this big rip dude. And what he means is, of course, you have to be under the bar lifting weights. Uh, you have to put in time under the bar. The muscles don’t just grow now you have to be thousands and thousands and thousands of reps over years and years and years to get into peak form. Now, his muscles might grow faster than mine, or more naturally want to be big and all bulky, but he still has to put in the reps. Malcolm Gladwell uh, talks a lot about entrance requirements and excellence requirements for every, for every skill there are entrance requirements and excellence requirements. For instance, if I want to be the center for the Los Angeles Lakers, I have to probably be about seven feet tall.

That’s an entrance requirement. Check it out. They, uh, the Lakers don’t have five, six foot one center. It doesn’t happen, but it, but just because I am seven feet tall does not mean I’m gonna be center for the LA Lakers. See, you also have to put in the work and over, over, over, over, over forever on top of your talent. So your talent is what starts. It’s what gets you there. It’s what gets the beginning. It might give you an inkling of what you’d be good at in life, what you might like to do. Following talents is nice cuz it feels good to be good at things. But please do not let your talent trap you into thinking that if you aren’t automatically good every time and excelling and just whipping it all the time, that you should quit. Or you should take your foot off the gas or you shouldn’t push and you shouldn’t do the time under the bar to mis take your talent and push it as far as you can. Be grateful you had that talent in the first place. Cuz not everybody has it. Not everybody has what you have. So don’t take it for granted. But also don’t think it’s gonna get you the whole way there. Don’t let your talent be a trap. Put in the time under the bar, do the reps. You’re gonna be thankful you did. I love you.