There are different views about talent and one view popularized by Malcolm Gladwell in his book Outliers is that talent is something that can be "acquired" through "deliberate practice" (or preparation):
"For almost a generation,
psychologists around the world have
been engaged in a spirited debate over
a question that most of us would
consider to have been settled years
ago. The question is this: is there
such a thing as innate talent? The
obvious answer is yes. Not every
hockey player born in January ends up
playing at the professional level.
Only some do – the innately talented
ones. Achievement is talent plus
preparation. The problem with this
view is that the closer psychologists
look at the careers of the gifted, the
smaller the role innate talent seems
to play and the bigger role
preparation seems to play."
Gladwell is of course echoing Dr. Anders Ericsson who authored the the seminal book on how to acquire expertise, The Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance and got this review from Steven D. Leavitt and Stephen J. Dubner of The New York Times Magazine and authors of Freakonomics:
The Cambridge Handbook of Expertise
and Expert Performance makes a rather
startling assertion: the trait we
commonly call talent is highly
overrated. Or, put another way, expert
performers "whether in memory or
surgery, ballet or computer
programming" are nearly always made,
not born. And yes, practice does make
perfect.
Ericsson however qualifies that the road to expertise is paved with a LOT OF DELIBERATE PRACTICE:
Among investigators of expertise, it
has generally been assumed that the
performance of experts improved as a
direct function of increases in their
knowledge through training and
extended experience. However, recent
studies show that there are, at least,
some domains where "experts" perform
no better then less trained
individuals (cf. outcomes of therapy
by clinical psychologists, Dawes,
1994) and that sometimes experts'
decisions are no more accurate than
beginners' decisions and simple
decision aids (Camerer & Johnson,
1991; Bolger & Wright, 1992). Most
individuals who start as active
professionals or as beginners in a
domain change their behavior and
increase their performance for a
limited time until they reach an
acceptable level. Beyond this point,
however, further improvements appear
to be unpredictable and the number of
years of work and leisure experience
in a domain is a poor predictor of
attained performance (Ericsson &
Lehmann, 1996). Hence, continued
improvements (changes) in achievement
are not automatic consequences of more
experience and in those domains where
performance consistently increases
aspiring experts seek out particular
kinds of experience, that is
deliberate practice (Ericsson, Krampe
& Tesch-Römer, 1993)--activities
designed, typically by a teacher, for
the sole purpose of effectively
improving specific aspects of an
individual's performance. For example,
the critical difference between expert
musicians differing in the level of
attained solo performance concerned
the amounts of time they had spent in
solitary practice during their music
development, which totaled around
10,000 hours by age 20 for the best
experts, around 5,000 hours for the
least accomplished expert musicians
and only 2,000 hours for serious
amateur pianists. More generally, the
accumulated amount of deliberate
practice is closely related to the
attained level of performance of many
types of experts, such as musicians
(Ericsson et al., 1993; Sloboda, et
al., 1996), chessplayers (Charness,
Krampe & Mayr, 1996) and athletes
(Starkes et al., 1996). (emphases in bold are mine)
Has anyone tried to put this into practice? Well, there's at least one and his name is Dan McLaughlin:
On his 30th birthday, June 27, 2009,
Dan had decided to quit his job to
become a professional golfer.
He had almost no experience and even
less interest in the sport.
What he really wanted to do was test
the 10,000-hour theory he read about
in the Malcolm Gladwell bestseller
Outliers. That, Gladwell wrote, is the
amount of time it takes to get really
good at anything — "the magic number
of greatness."
The idea appealed to Dan. His 9-to-5
job as a commercial photographer had
become unfulfilling. He didn't want
just to pay his bills. He wanted to
make a change.
Could he stop being one thing and
start being another? Could he, an
average man, 5 feet 9 and 155 pounds,
become a pro golfer, just by trying?
Dan's not doing an experiment. He is
the experiment.
The Dan Plan will take six hours a
day, six days a week, for six years.
He is keeping diligent records of his
practice and progress. People who
study expertise say no one has done
quite what Dan is doing right now.
Now, that's one view - another one is Elizabeth Gilbert's and you can watch her video when she spoke on Ted and here's an excerpt:
And then the Renaissance came and
everything changed, and we had this
big idea, and the big idea was let's
put the individual human being at the
center of the universe above all gods
and mysteries, and there's no more
room for mystical creatures who take
dictation from the divine. And it's
the beginning of rational humanism,
and people started to believe that
creativity came completely from the
self of the individual. And for the
first time in history, you start to
hear people referring to this or that
artist as being a genius rather than
having a genius. And I got to tell
you, I think that was a huge error.
You know, I think that allowing
somebody, one mere person to believe
that he or she is like, the vessel you
know, like the font and the essence
and the source of all divine,
creative, unknowable, eternal mystery
is just a smidge too much
responsibility to put on one fragile,
human psyche. It's like asking
somebody to swallow the sun. It just
completely warps and distorts egos,
and it creates all these unmanageable
expectations about performance. And I
think the pressure of that has been
killing off our artists for the last
500 years. (again, emphasis is mine)
So you have one view that talent can be acquired through at least 10,000 hours of deliberate practice and you have another where genius/talent is something that you receive as a gift. Personally, I think the answer is in-between. Gallup has a concept that's Strength-Based - find out what you're innately wired to do in the first place and then build on it:
Why Develop Strengths? Our research shows that strengths
development interventions can produce
increases in employee engagement.
Engagement, in turn, can improve
business outcomes by boosting
retention, productivity,
profitability, customer engagement,
and safety. Over the past decade,
Gallup has surveyed more than 10
million workers worldwide to gauge
their engagement. Only one-third
strongly agree with the statement, "At
work, I have the opportunity to do
what I do best every day." In a Gallup
Poll, among those who disagreed or
strongly disagreed with this
statement, not one single person was
emotionally engaged on the job.
Analyses of our clients' employee
engagement scores show that workgroups
that receive strengths development and
employee engagement interventions
achieve more robust growth in
engagement scores than do groups that
receive a standard engagement
intervention without a strengths
development component. Our studies
also indicate that employees who have
the opportunity to focus on their
strengths every day are six times as
likely to be engaged in their jobs and
more than three times as likely to
report having an excellent quality of
life. (emphasis mine) A strengths development strategy
not only can dramatically boost
employee engagement, it can also
substantially decrease disengagement.
So to answer your question, there is a way to find out what your "talent" is (Gallup), this becomes the basis of the word talented (or "genius" as Gilbert puts it) and you can acquire, develop and foster this using Dr. Anders Ericsson's program of deliberate practice. It's a very long answer and I hope it helps! :)
