Something happens fairly often when I’m selling my art at Forsyth Park in Savannah.
Someone will stop at my booth, look at my work and say:
“You’re so talented. I could never do anything like this.”
Sometimes they’ll add:
“I wish I had some talent.”
And I almost always answer:
“I’m sure you do.”
“No, really. I don’t.”
Oh?
Now they’ve done it.
😂
Because I start asking questions.
What Do You Love to Do?
I might ask:
“What do you really enjoy doing?”
Sometimes they don’t know.
So we keep going.
What are you good at?
What comes easily to you?
What do people ask you for help with?
What have you figured out how to do really well?
What are you proud of?
And usually, within a few minutes, something appears.
Maybe they’re wonderful with children.
Maybe they can walk into a chaotic room and organize it.
Maybe everybody wants their potato salad recipe.
Maybe they’re the person friends call when something goes wrong because they somehow know how to make everything feel manageable.
Maybe they can repair practically anything.
Maybe they grow beautiful tomatoes.
Maybe they can make a house feel warm and welcoming.
And almost invariably, they’ll say something like:
“Oh, but that’s nothing. Anybody can do that.”
Ahhhh.
There it is.
No.
Anybody can’t.
You can.
You’ve been doing it for so long that you’ve stopped seeing it as anything special.
Maybe We’ve Made Talent Too Small
When we hear the word talent, we tend to think of something impressive.
An artist.
A musician.
A dancer.
A gifted athlete.
Someone who does something that makes other people say, “Wow.”
But what about the woman who knows how to make every person at her dinner table feel welcome?
What about the man who can look at a broken machine and somehow understand how all the pieces fit together?
What about someone who can explain complicated things in a way everyone understands?
Or the person who can take six ingredients left in the refrigerator and somehow turn them into a wonderful dinner?
Why aren’t those talents?
Who decided?
And What About Creativity?
I think we’ve made creativity much too small too.
Creativity isn’t limited to making art.
To me, creativity is bringing into existence something that wasn’t there before.
A solution.
A meal.
A garden.
A business.
A better way of doing something.
A conversation.
A system.
An experience.
An idea.
You can be an accountant, a chef, a police officer, a teacher, a mechanic or a dancer and be creative.
Every time you encounter something that doesn’t quite work and think:
Hmmmm. What if I tried it this way?
you’re creating.
You just may not call it that.
Perhaps you developed a brilliant system for keeping your house clean.
I’m serious!
Maybe you know exactly what order to do things in, which products work best, how to accomplish in forty-five minutes what takes someone else three hours.
And you say:
“But that’s just cleaning.”
Is it?
You observed.
You experimented.
You developed a method.
You improved it.
You created something that works beautifully for you.
Sounds pretty creative to me.
We Stop Seeing What Comes Naturally
I think this may be one of the reasons we have trouble recognizing our own talents.
The things that come naturally to us don’t feel remarkable.
If I struggle terribly with something and finally learn how to do it, I know I’ve accomplished something.
But if I’ve always been able to do something easily, I may assume everybody else can do it too.
Often, they can’t.
And sometimes it takes another person looking at us and saying:
“Do you realize you’re really good at that?”
for us to see it.
That’s one of my favorite things about those little conversations at the park.
Someone arrives believing:
I don’t have any talent.
We talk.
We laugh.
We investigate a little.
And eventually I see their expression change.
They suddenly recognize something about themselves that was there all along.
They leave my booth with more than they arrived with.
Not because I gave them anything.
Because they discovered something that was already theirs.
I love that.
A Little Experiment
So now I’m going to do to you what I do to people at the park.
😂
What do you love doing?
What comes naturally to you?
What do people regularly ask you to help them with?
What have you figured out how to do in your own particular way?
What do you do that makes you quietly proud—even if you’ve always told yourself:
Oh, that’s nothing.
And here’s the big one:
What do you assume everybody can do simply because it’s easy for you?
Stay with that question for a moment.
There might be something hiding there.
Maybe you won’t discover that you’re secretly the next Picasso.
That’s okay.
The world already had a Picasso.
It hasn’t had another you.
Your creativity doesn’t have to look like mine.
Your talent doesn’t have to impress anyone.
It doesn’t even have to produce something you can sell.
It simply needs room to be recognized, appreciated and expressed in whatever way is authentically yours.
So the next time you catch yourself saying:
“I don’t have any talent.”
I’m going to ask you the same thing I ask people at Forsyth Park:
Are you sure?
Look again.
And this time, don’t dismiss the things that come easily.
Don’t dismiss what you love.
Don’t dismiss the ordinary things you’ve learned to do extraordinarily well.
Something is there.
What is your talent?