Lately I've been learning several new things.
When you learn something new, you inevitably think about the nuance of words like "sense" and "talent," so I turned what I thought this time into a blog.
The word talent has a mystical ring.
Like light particles falling from the sky.
Moments of noticing your talent are often told as miracle moments.
And there's a tacit premise that much of it is innate.
Asked whether I ever had a moment of noticing my own talent: not at all.
Even so, if I keep learning, there are "moments of grasping a small essence."
Show that to a complete beginner in the field and they might be surprised.
Is that talent?
Against the mystical story above, the answer is no.
But because the process is invisible, only the result looks like magic.
We tend to overrate others' growth in fields we don't know well.
Talent is relative.
In elementary school craft class, some kids made cool pieces without much experience; I was on the can't-make side.
Talent only surfaces with others' evaluation.
Like price set by supply and demand, talent takes shape only with others' reactions and evaluations.
However wonderful an ability, if it doesn't surface it's as if it doesn't exist.
That's also what's hard about talent.
We tend to treat talent as "something to be discovered"
— digging up a buried gem.
In reality, talent is something you build, package, and deliver to the right market.
And you keep discovering price. Closer to product development than treasure hunting.
That may diverge quite a bit from the usual nuance.
If we hypothesize it can be systematized like product development, it's natural that some procedure exists for putting talent to work in life.
Here I tried three steps:
① Notice your talent
② Make someone else notice your talent
③ Monetize it to a level you can live on
Not a rare breakdown.
Here's an important insight.
Between ① and ② there's a decisive gap.
① is mere self-evaluation.
② is market feedback. If ② is achieved, ①'s process becomes unnecessary.
Being evaluated itself proves "talent."
But intuition wants to reject that because of questions like:
"Get what you did evaluated" vs. "Do what will be evaluated."
The former is beautiful — the ideal story of doing what you love and succeeding.
Sadly, that's often an illusion from survivor bias.
The latter is leaner and more efficient. Basic career strategy sits with the latter.
Of course it's not either/or but a blend. Still, noticing the ratio matters.
Either way, if you want "what you did evaluated," an A/B-test-like approach as in product development works.
For example:
Try 10 kinds of things
Observe what others react to
Invest time in what got reaction
Repeat finer tests
Time and money constrain you, but probability rises for sure.
Discovering talent is a steady process of countless small trials and calmly observing feedback.
And "making people notice" is hard.
Amid information noise you need the right place, right people, right timing.
In the end, even "get what you did evaluated" requires a process similar to "do what will be evaluated."
A digression: while thinking about this for about two weeks, I had a dream.
In the dream someone said:
"Talent has interdependency."
I don't remember the logic after. But the phrase was interesting, so I wrote it down on waking and tried interpreting later.
If it means software needing a specific version of other software to run: to express talent A you need a specific "version" of talent B.
E.g. strong UI design talent comes alive with some programming understanding — you can design knowing technical constraints. But if programming knowledge goes too deep, you get bound by constraints and design freedom dies — something like that.
Back to talent itself, summarizing again:
Waiting for drops from heaven does nothing.
Talent is something you build, package, deliver to the right market, and keep discovering price for.
And it doesn't run alone. You manage dependencies with other talents, sometimes pin versions on purpose, sometimes cut cycles.
Talent may be like endless package management — understand dependencies, set the environment, keep deploying.
That's all.
P.S.
This time it became a how-to-on-talent piece like a dull business book, which I'm personally not that satisfied with.
After writing the how-to-ish first half I felt it didn't cohere — then I had that dream about talent and wrote about it, but it didn't come together well.
Both halves feel half-baked, but I didn't want the year's last blog sitting as a draft, so I'm publishing.
Please take care of me again next year.
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