Talent is simply the outstanding ability to do a certain thing efficiently, beautifully, and consistently. Whether it’s performing surgeries on the human heart, rocking melismas and vibratos while maintaining the original song’s language phonology, making premium quality handbags, writing algorithmically efficient code in Java or MASM, baking sourdough bread, swimming (or teaching to swim) butterfly, or maintaining a cohesive team culture – talent is an observable reality in many spheres.

A GENETIC LOTTERY OR AN ACQUIRED SKILL?

As with other topics in my research, the answer emerging from the data was: both/and, instead of either/or. Acknowledging the genetic underpinnings of talent, and the random inequality this biological lottery creates among us, has become a challenging, almost subversive task in the culture of meritocracy, whose message says unequivocally that whatever we end up with in life is always our own due. In this light, there’s a growing cultural sentiment that the extraordinary talent we observe in some humans – especially those with major visibility, like athletes, entrepreneurs, and creatives – is mostly a product of decades of discipline and sustained effort, rather than merely the genetic lottery ticket they won.

A related theme can be seen in the now widespread misinterpretation of Carol Dweck’s research on growth and fixed mindsets. In the United States, in particular, we pay a lot of lip service to the idea that in life we can go as far as our talents and dreams will take us. Therefore, reducing talent to the product of sustained effort and discipline, while dismissing its immutable genetic underpinnings, validates the illusion that we are in full control of our life outcomes – with the implication that the prosperous must have worked hard for their prosperity, and the struggling must have had their misery coming.

Like all meritocratic narratives, the meritocratic vision of talent is so easy to believe because it’s plain, logical, coherent, and allows far too many of us, particularly those having power over others, to stay comfortable in the ignorance of our privilege and the magnitude of its impact on our life outcomes.

The reality is far more complex. Human talents we observe most of the time result both from unearned privilege and earned merit. Effort and discipline undoubtedly play a role in cultivating talent, but the role of genetic factors in creating its origins is now widely downplayed. This largely enables the meritocratic hubris of today’s elites and erases the reality: not only does any talent include genetic, i.e. random, advantages, but how much society prizes any given talent at any given historical moment is a contingency. People whose talents we culturally (and economically) admire today would’ve had their talents seen as worthless, even if they’d somehow found and cultivated those, a few centuries ago.

The piece of good news here is that because of the random character of the genetic lottery, we all get different genetic advantages in different talent areas.

This leads me to the next point.

SECOND

There’s no such thing as having no talent. This bullshit, shaming message is very often translated in middle and high school to students whose performance indicators are low, permanently crippling a person’s vision of their potential. Remarkably, almost one half of these traumatic incidents happen around creativity – that is, kids being told they’re not good enough writers, actor, singers, dancers, etc.

In reality, low performance indicators of a particular person can be related to a plethora of factors, including, but not limited to: 1) inefficient, obsolete teaching techniques; 2) lack of students’ motivation because of a toxic relationship with the particular teacher or a larger toxic culture in school; 3) lack of discipline because of the culture of exhaustion and multitasking, taking a toll on a student’s mental health; 4) low expectations coming from the student’s familial environment, or their internalized low self-worth as a result of exposure to racism, homophobia, sexism, or any other kind of identity oppression.

The thing is, a talent has to be discovered – both by the person who carries it and others. For the individual, this requires curiosity, vulnerability, and self-kindness to explore different activities as a potential occupation, and for others – to create conditions that support those.

So when today my friends watch me masterfully do a number of things and call me “multitalented”, I tend to agree unless they add that unlike the lucky me, they haven’t won any talents in the genetic lottery. I then have to cite a ton of research data to explain: You’re dead wrong. You cannot not have talent. The problem is, you just haven’t discovered your talent yet. You have to keep on looking for it.

Aside from individual encouragement, a crucial part of my job as a leadership coach is to help change systems and institutions in order to facilitate the discovery and actualization of talent.

And that’s where another insight has consistently emerged over the years.

THIRD

You cannot expect people to discover and cultivate their talents when they’re living in chronic trauma and oppression, including those created by unfair and unethical workplace conditions. Vulnerability is the greatest casualty of trauma. Both discovering and cultivating one’s talent by definition require vulnerability. When people are chronically underpaid, exploited, bullied, discriminated against, commodified, gaslit into subservience and conformity, their genuine talents get cut at their knees.

Talent is universal, and opportunity is not. In this regard, in today’s globalized employment market, it’s particularly devastating to see how the fortunate Western people – predominantly white, male, straight, college-educated, [upper-]middle-class – look down on people from third-world countries once those come in, fleeing poverty, war, and oppression. I’ve been experiencing this firsthand for almost a decade now. Our talents, contributions, and ideas get routinely dismissed the moment it becomes known where we come from – even though there’s massive historical evidence that way too often it’s been people coming from the most marginalized and oppressed backgrounds who brought the most impactful insights and groundbreaking perspectives to the table.

In the majority of the West, including Western workplaces and educational institutions, diversity remains an eloquent slogan on the walls, often leveraged for marketing purposes, but it barely translates into measurable, observable, and meaningful practices that prevent discrimination in talent acquisition.

If you combine that diversity shortcoming with the conventional corporate hierarchy culture, based on the power-over paradigm of management (which, among other dysfunctions, breeds narcissism in the workplace), it’s easy to see how much human talent gets wasted and the costs of that waste. For companies, it means never profiting from the value of products and services that could be developed if diverse talent got incorporated into the workforce. For larger national economies and governments, it translates into additional taxes that never get paid and the expansion of healthcare, education, and other social services that never happens, reinforcing the vicious cycle of poverty.

And what does this discrimination mean for the affected individuals?

Last, but not least, the unambiguous answer to this emerged from a decade of research and fieldwork.

FOURTH

Unclaimed and unused talent is not benign. Unless let out and materialized into our unique contributions, it grows within us like a tumor, metastasizing through our soul, eating up our self-worth, and manifesting as aggression, depression, self-harm, violence and addiction.

That’s not a dramatic exaggeration – no matter the nature of the obstacles that impede its actualization, unused talent causes real trauma to people who carry it. Mind you: we’re not talking about frustration, disappointment, or just “not getting the career you wanted” here. We’re talking about trauma, in its full neurobiological experience. There’s an observable correlation between the magnitude of unrealized talent, and the gravity this trauma manifests with, when measured by mental health and behavioral outcomes.

People whose genetic lottery dispensed decent tickets, who’ve then invested years of unwavering effort and discipline into cultivating their talents despite overwhelming odds, who still end up being systemically locked out of opportunity and success because of structural inequality, experience this trauma at its worst – just like the industries that keep doors closed in their face because of systemic bias miss the most of value.

That’s why leadership work around talent and leadership work around diversity have a massive overlap.

In schools, including higher education institutions, uplifting talent means cultivating collective awareness about its complex nature, involving both genetic factors and acquired skills. It means understanding and dismantling systems and group dynamics that get in the way of students discovering their own talents and highlighting talents in one another – including perfectionism, cynicism, ranking creativity, hierarchical and zero-sum thinking about success, and externalizing human worth, i.e. making an individual’s vision of their self-worth dependent on the approval of others.

In the workplace, the above strategies hold up and there’s more. Corporate leadership should make sure that workers already aware of their best talents have access to relevant positions and opportunities, where the impact of their contributions could be fairly and precisely measured.

Such leaderships foster a workplace culture where people not only make a living through work, but experience an authentic sense of fulfillment because there’s an alignment between what they do and what they’re really good at. This sense, grounded in employees’ experience, eventually becomes a stronger force in talent acquisition and talent retention than monetary incentives or social benefits.