The BIG Difference Between TALENT And Skill | Seth Godin

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0:32Are you a believer that creative people are born with a creative gift or talent more than less creative people? Or can any type of creativity be learned?

0:43Seth Godin:Number one, almost nobody is talented. Talent is completely overrated. I would argue that you were born with certain physical talents that enabled you to excel in sports that I could never have acquired no matter how hard I tried. Even that said, though, Larry Bird was not born with the kind of talent that Michael Jordan was. Larry Bird just grounded out and shot more practice shots than anybody else. That's a skill. And so it feels to me like talent is a betrayal. It is undermining all of the people who put all that work into skill. Don't call someone skillful talented because they're not. They're skillful.

1:25Seth Godin:So we can agree that playing the piano is a skill in the sense that if you work at it, you get better at it. But I would like to believe that being enthusiastic is a skill. And then so is being creative. It's a skill. You can get better at it. You can choose to put in the work in whatever form it takes. We're not talking about graphic art here, unless you want it to be graphic art, to gain the skill. And if that's true, that's really good news because it means you're not stuck where you are. It means you can go to where you want to go. And it's really good news because skills can be acquired. That fills me with optimism about so many things in our world.

2:07Seth Godin:You know, we can point to the human condition and say, people are just doomed to hate each other and to undercut each other. But I can point to a culture where that's not happening. So how did that happen? Well, it's because it's a skill. What are the three biggest skills you think all human beings should acquire to just make them better human beings, happier, more, quote-unquote, successful, richer lives with relationships, health, everything? What are those three skills, whether you're 20 or 60? Number one is the skill of possibility, of seeing that things could be better. Number two, the skill of empathy, practical empathy, of understanding people don't know what you know, don't want what you want, don't see what you see, that they have a noise in their head that's different than the noise in your head.

2:57Seth Godin:And that's okay. And then the third one is the skill of learning how to learn. Of being open to saying, I see possibility. I see people who need to be served who aren't who I am. And I, if I put enough into this, can figure out how to make a contribution. Those, I think, are three skills. Yeah, it's really just understanding emotional intelligence and people and stepping in other people's shoes and having compassion. Why did you choose those three skills over copywriting or personal finance? There's some next level tactical ones like decision making is a skill. and almost every western human is terrible at it why why are we terrible at it because sunk costs are something that uh are probably hardwired into us what a sunk cost means is the harder you worked to have something the harder it is for you to give it up and we see this mistake happen all the time The example I'll give is you've got two tickets to the movies and they were really hard to get.

4:08Seth Godin:And you told your girlfriend that you were going to go to the movies together. On your way, you bump into a friend who says, I got two front row seats to see Hamilton. Do you want to go? That means your tickets are worthless. And a lot of people go, well, no, no, there's no well. It doesn't matter how much those tickets cost you. They're sunk. You already made that decision. You can't unmake it. And so we stick with a job longer than we should, or we stick to a way of thinking about the world longer than we should because it costs a lot. We went to law school, so now I have to be a lawyer. No, you don't.

4:42Seth Godin:The law school degree is a gift from your former self. You don't have to take it. You can say, no, thank you, and go do something that gives you joy instead.

4:55I have a brand new book called Make Money Easy. and if you're looking to create more financial freedom in your life, you want abundance in your life and you want to stop making money hard in your life, but you wanna make it easier, you wanna make it flow, you wanna feel abundant, then make sure to go to makemoneyeasybook.com right now and get yourself a copy. I really think this is gonna help you transform your relationship with money this moment moving forward. We have some big guests and content coming up. Make sure you're following and stay tuned to this episode of The Daily Motivation Show.

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6:26Again, have an amazing day, and I'll see you tomorrow with another episode of the Daily Motivation Show.

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