Talent Basics

Talent Basics– Many definitions are given for talent, few are listed below:

Talent is a set of personal characteristics that enhance one’s ability to achieve expertise in an accelerated manner.  These traits allow one to improve at quicker rates than others in their field that are at the same level of expertise/fitness/skill, etc.  This is because talent is one’s ability to adapt to training and develop skills in their specialized field.  Talent exists when strong genetics and a desire to practice come together to create the superior ability for a specific activity.  It can only exist along with deliberate interest.  Because of this, talent will often only become apparent after a moderate amount of practice as this is when one’s ability to adapt and improve is more clearly visible.  Talent is not merely one’s “base” ability at a task – this comes about often as a result of exposure to skills and experiences in one’s early days.

Talent Basics- Talent is the eventual potential of an individual in a certain endeavor. It’s not how good one is right away – it’s how good one can become in a perfect world. The most important subcategories of talent are probably:

1) Innate (before training) ability

2) The mental and physical capabilities to spend time and effort trying to improve: not losing motivation, getting injured etc. (Although mental toughness and injury resilience can be improved, there is a talent component to both.)

3) The amount of improvement that happens with a given amount of practice i.e. the ability of the body to adapt or the mind to master

Success is a product of talent and the environment. The realization of one’s full talent is extremely rare and relies heavily on being in an optimal environment, plus a great deal of luck.

– Talent is that part of a performance which, when that performance is evaluated, is attributed to God or Nature.

Talent Basics– Talent means the skill that someone has quite naturally to do something that is hard. Someone who has talent is able to do something without trying hard. It is an ability that someone is born with. It is a high degree of ability or of aptitudes. People may have talent for music, dancing, acting, sport or other skills. Someone who has talent is talented:

• Mozart had a talent for music. He had a great talent. He was very talented.
• We say that someone is “born with a talent”.
• If someone has talent they still have to work very hard if they want to be very good at something. Some people become quite good at something even if they do not have much talent, but if they are willing to work very hard at the skill. Some people “waste their talent” (they have talent but do not work hard at it, they do not “use their talent”).
• Other words for talent are aptitude or gift. A talented person is a gifted person who has worked really hard.
• The Broadway musical Fame is about a group of talented young people in a dancing school.
• The word talent used to mean a weight and a piece of money in Assyria, Greece and Rome. This is the sense in which it is used in the Bible in the parable of the five talents (Matthew, xxv, 14-30).
• Talent consists of those individuals who can make a difference to organisational performance either through their immediate contribution or, in the longer-term, by demonstrating the highest levels of potential.
• Talent management is the systematic attraction, identification, development, engagement, retention and deployment of those individuals who are of particular value to an organisation, either in view of their ‘high potential’ for the future or because they are fulfilling business/operation-critical roles.

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