Tola Performance: There Is No Such Thing as Talent

Jason has a Performance Coaching business in which he works with professionals to help and support them throughout the season and year. He helps them maintain a good headspace and works on their personal development on and off the field. He also manages and plays for Oriflamme polo team

Photograph by Emily Gordon

There Is No Such Thing as Talent… Natural ability vs effort and practice

The definition of talent is to have ‘natural aptitude or skill’. So, if you are to say someone is talented, you are making that conclusion based purely on their ‘natural’ ability over their practiced ability. If you look at a 28-year-old football player, there is no possible way you could say they are talented, unless you knew them at the age they started. The age they started would show their unaffected natural ability. If they’re a great footballer at 28, that will be a result of talent, practice, coaching and training, but to decipher which was more prominent would be impossible, unless you knew all the work they put in, or didn’t, but that would still involve some element of guesswork.

If you look at two young children who both jump on a horse having never ridden or never held a polo stick and ask them both to stick and ball, you can to some degree assess their talent. There is a high chance one will be better than the other. Therefore, the child that is better, is more talented. If you see the two children ten years later playing polo, but you don’t have any knowledge about what they have been doing over the ten years, which child is now better? The talented one or the non-talented one?

The word talent can be unhelpful and limiting

If you start to overemphasise talent, that could debilitate you as an athlete. If you say, ‘he is very talented’ firstly you take away the work that person may have put in (which you probably don’t know much about), secondly you take away your own belief in your potential i.e ‘if he’s talented, I’m not’. If you look at someone like Jonny Wilkinson, many will say he was a talented rugby player, which I’m sure as a youngster he was, but from that moment he had a very disciplined and driven mindset to become better. When he drop-kicked the World Cup winner in 2003, was that based on his talent or the work he put in up to that point?

If youngsters or anyone believes overly in talent and see their peers as more or less talented than them, this will automatically create less focus on coaching/ practice/ training, for both the talented and the untalented. The talented may fall into a feeling that they don’t need to work as hard as the others and the untalented will feel no matter how much practice they put in; they will not get as good as the talented.

Photograph by Mark Beaumont

Talent in polo is diluted by the vast additional resources needed to be good at polo

Is there talent in polo?

When looking at polo, talent becomes even more diluted because of the resources you need to be good at polo. Are Argentine polo players better than other nations because of talent or their resources? Clearly, it’s because of their resources, opportunities and culture, NOT talent. Of course, those top Argentine polo players are talented, but I’m sure in Finland or China there are some equally talented polo players that never get the opportunity to play polo, let alone the resources if they did start. When talking about resources we are talking about horses, practices, time playing, opportunity to play, money, coaching, culture and I’m sure many more. Another sport that is heavily based on resources is Formula 1, would Lewis Hamilton win the champion in a Volkswagen Polo? Of course he wouldn’t, this is an exaggeration of the point, but without the resource the initial talent isn’t realised. If he had a slightly worse car than Verstappen, he may seem a less ‘talented driver’ than Verstappen but in reality his talent or ability is hindered by the resource.

What’s the point of this article?

The less you believe in talent the more you allow yourself to find ways to get better. Rather than accepting others as more or less talented, instead you could ask the question, what did they do to get as good as they are? Or what can I do to get better? I think language overtime can be very powerful, if you start absorbing the language and ideas you are given that could dictate the actions you take. To become a good polo player, you need to put in the right work and find the right resources not worry about how talented you are.

Contact Jason on tolaperfomance@gmail.com www.tolaperformance.com