Talent

From dictionary.com: Talent - noun - a special natural ability or aptitude.

From Dose of Lyndsy: Talent - noun - that thing that makes other people do things better than I do them and that makes me want to hit them.

For the most part, we all know talent when we see/hear/read it. Talented people just convey it better than people who aren't talented. When I listen to old Whitney Houston albums, she makes the hairs on my arms stand up (in a good way). Listening to William Hung makes me wish I were deaf. You just know the difference.*

Talent's all well and good...when you enjoy your talent. Unfortunately for me, that's not the case. I'm a talented student. My fellow law students hated me for it. There they were, hunched over their textbooks until their vision doubled, while I sat in my dorm room making awful-looking homemade cards and painting wooden boxes. But yeah, I'm not a student anymore.

I'm also a talented lawyer. I didn't do it for long, but someone I trust, and who would know talent if he saw it, told me I am. Awesome...but being a lawyer sucks.

This is not to say that talent is everything. Even if you are talented, you still have to cultivate the talent. Tiger Woods looks great at tournaments, but he also practices every day, for hours and hours. Whitney Houston didn't just walk into a recording studio, belt out a few tunes and leave.

However, working up your talent is much easier than starting from scratch with something and struggling from there. I also believe that you can tell the difference between the product of someone who's talented and someone who's worked their way to proficiency.

I say all of that to lament the fact that I am not a talented writer. When I was looking for a job, people kept asking me what it is that I want to do, what I like to do. I said I didn't know what I really liked to do, and as for the job, didn't care, as long as I make enough money to live and enjoy the people I work with. Looking back, I just think I didn't know. I do now.

I've spent the last two weeks on the couch, recovering from back surgery. As much as I love Netflix, there's only so much Murder, She Wrote and Bones I can watch. So I took up an old hobby - blog stalking. What struck me more than anything else is that there are some SERIOUSLY talented bloggers out there.

I read a lot - books, blogs, magazines. Each medium has a different set of challenges. I think being an interesting, intriguing, decent blog writer has to be one of the hardest things to do. If you've bought the magazine or you're sitting in a doctor's office too bored to even count the ceiling tiles, you'll probably read most of it, even if the article doesn't catch you right away. I don't think we expect books to excite right from the beginning. There are hundreds more pages to read most of the time. The really thrilling stuff is locked in the middle somewhere. If a blog doesn't catch you right from the start, clicking away takes almost NO effort.

I want to be one of those interesting bloggers. I want people I don't even know to read my blog and want to come back for more. But for me, it's going to take work and a lot of it.

*Art may be the one exception to this. I remember an episode of Murphy Brown (Sweet God, I'm getting old), where Murphy claimed that her 4-year old kid could paint better than the artists whose exhibits she was viewing. She turned it into a challenge. She had her kid paint a picture and then placed it in an exhibit. For the most part, the art critics walked by and commented that it looked like a child painted it. One critic stopped and commented that perhaps on the surface it looked like that, but if you looked into the depths of the work, you could see the soul and meaning, and blah blah blah. The rest of the art critics bought on that and in the end, all declared what a masterpiece it was.