No respect for the status quo

I said it many times before, talent is like Iron ore or raw steel. By its natural definition, Iron is a pile of minerals and rocks, and it may be tough, it may be rare, it may even be beautiful, but still, it is just a simple rock. Iron needs shaping, good steel is made by heating the Iron up to the point of melting, and then cooling it with cold water. And even then, as that is not enough, physical pressure is added to reinforce its characteristics.Final touch is given by masters that work their magic, by giving the final shape to the steel and turning the initial Iron rock into e.g. a beautiful, yet deadly Japanese katana.

So, you see, it takes a lot of time, a lot of effort, and master's hands to start with the Iron rock and finish with the sharpest sword there ever was. Talent is no different. Raw talent is nothing (and never was anything) without firm discipline, hard work, and if not by master's guidance, than, by all means, it has to be led by either rich imagination or restless ambition. Or both.

Now, all of this is nothing new. What is new, however, is that the world is changing. Constantly. It changes faster and faster as the time passes, and with that the rules of the game change. As the number of people on this planet grows, the overall amount of talent grows bigger. There are more and more talented people each day, and we should not be baffled by this, as that is a bi-product of a simple statistical truth: if there are more people now than there were e.g. 100 years ago, then, statistically speaking, there should be more talented people today than 100 years ago, right? So how come I have a feeling that the greatest minds of humanity are either dead or dying, and humanity is somehow running in a more or less same spot for a while now?

What I think is that our iron-to-katana formula needs a new ingredient, so except discipline, hard work, master tutoring, imagination and ambition, a new factor should come into the equation: courage.

As my favorite graffiti artist (and one of my all-time favorite artists), Banksy, so eloquently puts it:

Nothing in the world is more common than unsuccessful people with talent,so leave the house before you find something worth staying in for.Think outside the box, collapse the box, and then take a fucking sharp knife to it.

If I leave statistics aside (and trust me, I do so with a heavy heart), I think that we all have a talent for something, it is just a question of how brave we are to look into ourselves and find that something for what we are good for. It is a question of how brave we are to find it, and go for it.It is true that, many times it is a question of incentive, of the existence of that one spark that would happen to light our talent up and reveal our capacities, a question of a single most important moment in our lives that would change us forever.After that moment, our courage is the ingredient that will keep our engines running and make us show our talent to the world.

For example, I for once, was not always a programmer. Actually, when I was in high school, my software development skills were next to none and my high school grades were mediocre when it comes to software development, and this was the case up until my senior year. Then, my young high school professor decided to go off tracks, as it was her last year as a high school professor, and teach us about cutting edge software development technologies instead of the same boring SW development shit-algorithms all senior years were learning many years before us. I found those new lessons and technologies so fascinating, I cannot even describe with words. That event was the one that formed an explosion of creativity inside of me, and from that point on I did not separate myself form a computer for a single day. Ever. Everything that happened after that is history.

The rush of ideas that I felt that day, all those things I wanted to do and to create, well....I still feel that rush even as I write these lines. What I discovered since that day is that, I yes, have a talent for something, and up until now I have shaped it with many sleepless nights spent above my keyboard, a lot of reading and years of education, but above all I was never afraid to try new things, to show what I know and what I can do out in the open, and I was never afraid to push my ideas into implementation and reality.

So my dear friends, family, known and unknown readers, while you are reading this, your talent sits somewhere inside of you, getting bored as hell, waiting for you to invoke it and start harnessing its awesomeness. Leave the house before you find something worth staying in for, go out there and show the world what you are made of, because you that are reading this, whoever you are, you might be the new Einstein, Paganini, Maria Curie or Shakespeare.

What might be this text of mine in a nutshell, is a part of a commercial poster of Apple Inc. from 1997 that says:

Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes.
The ones who see things differently. They’re not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them.
About the only thing you can’t do is ignore them. Because they change things. They invent. They imagine. They heal. They explore. They create. They inspire. They push the human race forward. 

The sweetest thing is that, in my opinion, You already have it in you, and you just need to grab it. The only thing you need is a touch of courage and wonders will be born.