Do you ever feel like you have a lot of random talents that

>>18293361
>Do you ever feel like you have a lot of random talents that you're just like.. kind of good at, but not really, excellent in?
Yeah, I'm pretty much a jack of all trades (unless it comes to sports and shit)

>what should I do?
In what sense?

if you cooklike you draw i'm suprised people haven't thrown up yet.

but seriously, being good at a variety of stuff is good. now you need to take one of them and put in the effort to get REALLY good. remember, there is no such thing as talent. it's just how much work you're willing to put in. and no, you don't have to "find what you love" first. you pick something and then you go to work without whining.

So actually, you are good at a few things it seems. So you need to focus on fine tuning one of these skills and build it into a career. Whichever one of these talents you are most passionate about is the one you should focus on as it will lead to a career you will be happy at. The other talents you have can just be your hobbies. Dude, you can draw, code, cook. You're sounding like a class A bitch. I can't draw or code. I fucking wish I could. Especially draw. You have a leg up on every person I know and probably that you know as well.

>>18293395
yeah I honestly feel like I have more in the way of talents than a lot of people I know but I guess it's a matter of picking one and go from decent to fucking badass

>>18293387
no I actually cook much better than I draw thank god

Yeah that's what it seems like. I keep feeling like I'll accidentally stumble on something that I have a lot of natural talent for, but that's just me being an american for you. guess I should just focus on the one that can make me the most money
>>18293367
Good to know it's at least relatively common

I mostly just want to know if other people have had this problem and overcame it to pick something to focus on

>>18293411
really nigger, stop thinking anybody has any "natural talents". talent is only aquired skills. sure, somebody that does downhill biking might suprisingly discover that he's very "talented" at motocross. WHO WOULD HAVE THOUGHT? HE MUST BE SOME NATURAL TALENT!

if you're better at something when you start out than your peers, it's because you have gotten a part of the required skills from somewhere else already. that gets you trough the first few levels easier, but that's a very limited bonus that soon wears off. for example, imve been playing piano since kindergarden and as a result, i can pick up any instrument that is slightly similar (like guitar, harp, violin, etc) and play it from the get go decently. but mind you, that's not because i'm oh such a talented violinist. it's because i don't struggle with some basic musical skills that complete novices would have to overcome first. if i would avtually pursue playing the violine, i would soon discover that you can't have a "natural talent" and reach my limit where i had to grind and practice like everybody else. the only advantage i would have is that i would get some ego boost in the beggining, which makes it more likely that i keep at it even after it gets hard.
use your various skills but donm give up the moment you reach that limit where hard work come into play. that's where most just give up and walk away because they "lack talent".
take your drawing for example. sure, you might be able to impress people who have zero clue about drawing. but i see cringey chicken scratch linework, the fact that you resort to drawing animu because you have no concept of human anatomy, the fact that you just copy your work because you lack creativity and the skillst to create something new, the fact you have no concept of depth and shading and that you do the age old thing where you draw one side of the face covered in hair because you can't draw a proportioned face or two eyes that match. get to work now!

>>18293438
>stop thinking anybody has any "natural talents"
popping in to say that I had to do this stupid fucking research paper for a class, and apparently this is a bit of a myth, and natural talent does account for a lot of success, at least at a pro level

>>18293450
how so? if you can convince me that a baby is born with natural talent at something, i'll happily believe you. but so far, nobody has had any good argument that i know of or evidence for it.

>>18293458
Brooke Macnamara and her colleagues from Princeton University recently conducted the largest review and meta-analysis of studies exploring the relationship between deliberate practice and performance in several domains (Macnamara, Hambrick, & Oswald, 2014). Their research also tests the widespread “10,000-hour rule” popularized in several books (Colvin, 2008; Gladwell, 2008) that suggests that it takes 10,000 hr of practice to become an expert in any given skill domain. Their research included 111 independent samples, with 157 effect sizes and a total sample of 11,135 participants (Macnamara et al., 2014). They explored the deliberate practice and performance relationship in various domains and two sets of factors. The first factor was based on the predictability of a task or how often the behavior might be expected to be performed (e.g., handling an aviation emergency to running each day) and the second was how the previous research was conducted and how practice was actually measured (e.g., recall or log).
Their findings contradict the popular urban myth and claim that individual differences in expertise and performance are largely accounted for by the amount of deliberate practice a person engages in over time. In fact, the percentage of variance accounted for by deliberate practice in five specific domains was as follows: games 26%, music 21%, sports 18%, education 4%, and profes- sions less than 1% (Macnamara et al., 2014). Even in the most widely studied domains of expertise research (music and chess), deliberate practice does not appear to adequately explain individual differences in performance (Hambrick et al., 2014).

>>18293411
>I mostly just want to know if other people have had this problem and overcame it to pick something to focus on
Well for me at least, I just picked what I enjoy doing and went with it.

>>18293472
A subsequent meta-analysis (Macnamara, Moreau, & Hambrick, 2016) focused on the perfor- mance of elite athletes to test the premise that individual differences in sports performance largely reflect individual differences in accumulated amount of deliberate practice (Ericsson, 2007). Overall, deliberate practice accounted for 18% of the variance in sports performance. However, the contribution differed depending on skill level. Most important, deliberate practice accounted for only 1% of the variance in performance among elite-level performers.


Nowack, K. (2017). Facilitating Successful Behavior Change: Beyond Goal Setting to Goal Flourishing. Consulting Psychology Journal: Practice and Research, doi:http://dx.doi.org.proxy.lib.pdx.edu/10.1037/cpb0000088

>>18293478
Oh lel, that's the doi for my school's database. Hope I don't get graded down for that....

>>18293472
they tested the "practice vs talent" myth. which i agree on, is not completely accurate. some people jut need less effort than others to reach the same levels. but what they don't take into consideration (probably because that's almoat impossible) is cross area skills. you can not seriously tell me that a baby is born with an inherent talent for chess. it might have had the lucky constellation of beneficial ciscumstances in his esrly development stages, that lead to certain synapsis forming that are needed for logical thinking, analitical skills and tactical intelligence. might be his mom played a lot of beneficial stuff with him during ages 2-7. what do we know. that should count as practicing those skills too, but it will never get factored in because it's way too foggy. but it is undeniably a huge factor.
take my son for example. he has better physical performance than his peers, but that's not because he was just "born lucky". that's because when most other parents would strap their kids in the rocker, i'd let him roam free and develope motoric skills. when others told their kid to "get down there, that's dangerous" i let him develope a good sense of what he's capable of and what he can't yet do (he never got seriouly injured. if he realized a task was too dangerous, he backed away, even at age 2). on the other hand, i haven't been forcing him to take piano lessons at age 3 like some asian parents do and as a result, he will never be able to catch up with lingling. it depends on what the parents prioritize (even if unconsciously). that is what shapes your "natural talent".

>>18293502
That's a good point, but since anybody asking about how important practice is would be past those formative years, that fact shouldn't change any conclusion they'd reach to apply to their own life.

>>18293478
again, i see one glaring problem with those "evidence". they only take knto account the hours of practice that went into that specific task. but they deliberately skip the fact that you can have some partial skills already down even before you start with a specific training. for example, ofc you will be better at aiming when you pick up archery after you already mastered the shooting range. ofc you will be better than your friend who has never learned to aim before. it's just silly to not take this into account.

>>18293508
that's true. ofc it's easier to pick up something you already have developed some basics skills to do. but that doesn't mean you can not also get equally as good in something else. you'd just probably need a lot more than those "10000" hours. probably more like 20000, since those skills have developed from age 0-10.

>>18293511
That's a pretty good point, but earlier in the paper they actually mentioned how the most effective practice is practice of difficult things in the relevant field- so the sort of peripherally related practice you're referring to, I'd assume, is much less useful and relevant than directly related practice, which of course would be what was tested in those studies. I could see this though if there's a difference in fundamental attitude towards life between people that lead some to practice their skills in a vague way all the time and in many ways and others to not do this that contributes to skill difference. This probably shouldn't be conflated with the concept of practice though, because it's a personality trait, not something deliberate like practicing something.