The BIG Difference Between TALENT And Skill | Seth Godin EP 455

0:28I am so grateful for you. community. All you have to do is go to lewishouse.com slash giveaway. And that's where you'll get all the details about how you can be a winner. And again, we're choosing winners every single day for 10 straight days. 10 days of greatness is my way of saying thank you for a decade of greatness. So what are you waiting for? Head to lewishouse.com slash giveaway and enter the giveaway right now. Hi, my name is Lewis Howes and welcome to the Daily Motivation Show.

1:09Are 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? 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.

1:52It 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. 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.

2:34It 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. 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.

3:10What 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. 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.

3:53Those 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 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.

4:38The example I'll give is you've got two tickets to the movies and they were really hard to get. 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.

5:15We went to law school, so now I have to be a lawyer. No, you don't. 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.

5:35Thank you so much for listening to today's episode of The Daily Motivation, and I hope you have an amazing rest of your day. If you enjoyed this episode, make sure to click the link in the description that will take you to the full episode of our main podcast on the School of Greatness. And if you are loving the daily motivation, please follow us over on Apple Podcasts and Spotify and leave us a review over on Apple Podcasts right now. And if you want more exclusive content and ad-free listening experience, make sure to subscribe to our Greatness Plus channel on Apple Podcasts right now. And if you want to get even more inspiration from our world-class guests and learn how to improve your life and take it to the next level, then make sure to sign up for the Greatness newsletter and get it delivered right to your inbox over at greatness.com slash newsletter.

6:25Again, have an amazing day and I'll see you tomorrow with another episode of the Daily Motivation Show.