I play old-time mandolin as a hobby. Not very well, but it’s fun. Whenever I tell someone this, sometimes they also have a music hobby and we talk about it a bit. if they don’t, they almost always say “I wish I had the talent to play music”.
That’s a self-defeating and toxic attitude. Not for me - I guess it’s flattering that they think I have some mysterious “talent” thing that was given to me somehow. But I really don’t - I decided to start playing around 50, worked pretty hard for about 2 years, and I am competent in a very limited set of circumstances that I’ve worked on. Put me in a rock or blues band and I’ll fall on my face, but I can hold my own in old-time, celtic and sometimes bluegrass.
But it’s a toxic sort of excuse for the person saying it. If you unpack that statement a little, what it’s really doing is creating a kind of fatalistic excuse. The person is seeming to say “I wish I could play music, but that was not allowed me by fate”. What they’re really saying, though, without realizing it, is more like “I wish I had the credential of being able to play music, but the effort isn’t worth it (or I’m not disciplined enough”. And it’s weirdly denigrating of the people who have put the work in - it’s akin to saying that the other person hasn’t worked hard, that the ability to play music was somehow unfairly “given” to them.
The very common use of the phrase “Tech wizard” is similar. Certainly there can be some natural tendencies towards technical thinking (as there can be towards musical thinking) but no one is born knowing how to code, or how a computer works, or how to puzzle through a programming problem. It takes long, hard work to become good as an engineer, in any domain.
Think about how strange it would be if we said similar things about other professions. “Gee, I wish I could drive a bus, but I don’t have the talent”, “Wow, those construction wizards are just amazing”, etc. Sometimes that language does get used, in complex domains, but do you really believe someone has “talent” for, say, tax accounting?
One of the reasons I don’t like this language is that it discourages people who might otherwise join the career. They might think - “gee, programming is really hard for me. I guess I’m a muggle, not a tech wizard”, and not realize that, at some point, programming is hard for EVERYONE.
So…if you want to play an instrument, or be a programmer, don’t say you don’t have “talent”. Just give it a try - work on it! You’ll get there, eventually, just like anyone else.
Great post. I like what you're saying. I have no innate musical abilities, but I have over many years learned to play bass and guitar through brute force. When I was younger I thought if you didn't have talent you couldn't play music. Now I know, it just requires practice. There are some people in any field who have innate talent (Anders Hejlsberg whom I worked with many years ago is a top 10 programmer in the world) but anyone who wants to learn a skill can do so. Maybe not at the top levels, but certainly at levels that are command respect.