Creating in Captivity: The Myth of Talent

I have been asking this question to people I meet on the street, in workshops, and in interviews. While the answers have a lot of overlap, I find it interesting how little certainty there is about which capacity we are born with and which can be cultivated.

On the first day with a new group of art students I would get right down to the business of debunking the talent myth with the aim to set the inclusive (and provocative) conditions for creative exploration, with a firm “I don’t believe in talent.”

In my mission to raise Creative Intelligence, I insist on poking at the hornet’s nest of limiting beliefs and cultural stereotypes that swarm creativity. I’ll start by unravelling some untruths around the T-word. If you look it up, talent is generally defined as a person’s natural endowments; the aptitudes you are born with.

Over thirty years in art education has given me the steadfast conviction that our original aptitudes can be refined and expanded at any age. First we need to unearth whichever aspects of our creative talents got buried or dimmed on the path to adulthood. The myth of talent is a major conspirator in this kidnapping of our creative power.

I confess to cringing when I hear the T-word. “You’re so talented.” Or, if you are from my neck of the woods, “Oh my gahd, you’re like, wicked talented!” I don’t even enjoy it so much when someone calls my students ‘talented’ after seeing their artwork. I know the comment is well intentioned and the appreciation is appreciated.

What stings is the erasure of the journey of trial, error, and the incredible persistence it takes to do anything very well. I’m suspicious of the compliment especially when it is followed up by other popular variations, like “I’m not talented” or, “They are the most talented kid in class” or person on the team, whatever.

There are a few reasons why so many people hold onto myths regarding their creative talents. To pursue them is to cultivate an olympic patience on an unpredictable trajectory. Fear of both the patience and the uncertainty is enough to scare many away. It’s a reality in this world that the creative spirit is at risk of being broken in our vulnerable adolescent years or earlier, like a bad habit that needs to be tamed in exchange for behavior that theoretically leads to predictable success in the world.

Adolescence is uncomfortable; everything is metamorphosing at a rate we can’t yet understand—we are just in too deep to have much perspective. How cruel it is to cordon off creativity at that incredibly receptive juncture. For me, teaching middle schoolers some days was like hovering over a petri dish, watching them writhe and squirm their way toward the next stage. It’s not always pretty, but it is pretty inspiring to see these pupils a few years later crossing a stage with swelling hearts as they face the next big leap into adulthood.

My experience has shown me that the precious incubation period of adolescence is often the moment when learning creative competence hits a stagnation point. It often remains unexplored well into adulthood, when fresh breaks in creative confidence can happen as well. At any age the seeds of this distortion are the obsession with prioritizing product and public achievement over the learning it takes to get there. A rush towards an imagined finish line—and the fear that builds as it looms—causes us to cut corners and settle for a façade of success.

The modus operandi of perfectionism is to look fabulous on the outside. It can look like fussing over every minute detail before starting something and calling that ‘quality control’, or avoiding important groundwork by obsessing over the appearance of things, akin to building castles on pillars of sand. Even more insipid is the way people get their creative aspirations squelched by a third party who swaggers in to wield their own perfectionism.

One time early in my career I had a father show up to a parents meeting with his own portfolio, produced decades earlier, to show me how good he was and to imply how little he presumed that I knew. The dressing down was because I gave his daughter an A for the term and not an A+. (Yup, WTF-factor 5000!). If you give a student an A+ in the first quarter of their junior year—where do they have to go from there? To be fair, I dislike and distrust most grading systems. Still, I wasn’t manipulating it for her gain, or my own. I was marking her also on a more subtle and more gradually acquired skillset than technical drawing accuracy. Creative problem solving and participation in class feedback were significant components of the courses I delivered.

My cheeks burned as this man tried to humiliate me. I stood my ground and defended my choice with the earnest optimism that his daughter was indeed excellent and could become better than he even imagined. (I’m pretty sure I cried in the car on the way home that night, though.)

Talent conflated with technical skill limits growth and overlooks the numerous other potentials we possess. This compartmentalization is incredibly isolating - not just for the purported geniuses perched on their pedestals, tumbleweeds swirling in the distance, but for any one who strives. In my experience with creative functioning, attending carefully to the process more often leads to a ‘successful’ product and repeating that cycle over and over is what builds mastery over time.

Of course, how we define success is relative to the task at hand and our idiosyncratic views. Regardless, success reached through perfectionism and the arrogance that we have all the answers is bound to crack under the inevitable pressures of change.

Even within artist’s circles there still exists discrimination against artists who choose to teach art and design. While mingling at an art event I shared with someone that I was the head of art and design at an international school here in Mallorca, Spain.

“I don’t believe in art education. Art can’t be taught,” he flatly responded like a fly landing in my soup.

This is not the first time over the years I have received this shut-down. The smug apathy behind the comment may have just been a bored and uninspired person seeing if they could stump me for some cheap banter.

I suspect this apathy is also founded in the myth of talent, an effort to uphold a forfeit exclusivity that glorifies genius as a lonely power play - so rare it can’t be taught.

My response? “Sounds like you never had a teacher like me.” I delivered my snarky come-back with a smile because I know it can take just one empowering teacher to open that aperture of untapped talent and the creative toolkit that unleashes it into the world.

The myths around talent that promote comparison and perfectionism set the scarcity-mindset bells in my head clanging. Pervasive, careless words and dismissals coming from teachers and carers regarding our abilities are hurtful at any age. They harm both the giver and the receiver. Unfortunately, too many of us perpetuate these untruths in our own language throughout life.

The expectation of a preordained talent that hasn’t had the chance to move through the necessary growing pains to flourish creates a dissonance that gets worse over time. The rift between our innocent creative spirit and our wilful aspirations for achievement truncate our potential in any area of life or field of work. Without safe spaces to explore the depths of our gifts, they risk devolving into entropy.

I’ve shared a few examples of the toxicity of the talent myth within designated art-making spaces. And what if you are not enmeshed in that world? You may have a talent with persuasive speech, finances, physical dexterity, recycling...the list is endless.

The confusion between creativity and talent, the fundamental misunderstanding of the symbiotic relationship of these two powers, extends beyond the art community and into the public vernacular. We spread the notion that they are fixed possessions you either got at birth or didn’t.

I challenge this and remind everyone that we are way more elastic and expansive than that. To be honest, I don’t think we even need to settle on a concrete definition for creativity and talent. I enjoy the variability and debate. What I won’t abide is treating these birthrights as a thing of the haves and have-nots.

When I say, “I don’t believe in talent,” what I mean is I don’t believe a talent tells the whole story of who we are as evolving beings. We are all creatives-in-waiting.