The Scariest Thing About Talent

The scariest thing about talent is that the ‘talented’ underestimate their abilities and the ‘talentless’ overestimate their abilities. The fact that both are essentially blind to that fact is even scarier to me. Thus, the people most confident in their abilities, are the ones least able. We call this ‘incompetent’ but really just mean that they have not yet achieved a level of competency. 

Sometimes in my job, I have to explain to people that they are not currently as good as they could be. It isn’t a very nice task to be honest, no one wants to hear that. But if the actor is to grow, someone must tell them. It isn’t a pleasant feeling for an actor to question their own ability. Their confidence comes from the belief they hold in their competence, their acting talent.

If I challenge that, their confidence can take a huge hit. I wrote a blog post where I asked the reader if the one thing they really didn’t want to believe was true - could actually be holding them back. Could their competence, their talent be letting them down?

Of course there was a backlash. It isn’t nice to be challenged on something so core and sensitive. I believe that many misunderstood this post, but the shock value of my post really did shake a few people into action – which was the point.

The scariest thing about competency or what we call ‘talent’ in the acting industry – is that we aren’t very good at judging our own abilities. Which means that we have to rely on others which is unsettling.

Learning who you can trust is difficult. Your Mum won’t want to hurt your feelings, your teacher wants you to finish the course, your agent doesn’t want to damage your confidence. 

Who on earth would tell you that you’re not as good as you think you are?!

 So why can’t we tell for ourselves?

If you’re incompetent, you can’t know you’re incompetent. […] the skills you need to produce a right answer are exactly the skills you need to recognize what a right answer is. —David Dunning 

Some call it illusory superiority.

Psychologists Dunning and Kruger discovered that for specific skills, the lower the level of competence, the more we are prone to overestimate our talents:

1) We tend to overestimate our own skill level

2) We fail to recognise genuine skill in others

3) We fail to recognise the degree of our skill inadequacy

4) But they do recognise and acknowledge our previous lack of skills, if we receive effective training in that skill.

The problem is that in order to take advantage of professional training, you need to acknowledge that something is wrong.

On the flip side, experts experience expert-induced amnesia, part of unconscious competence, getting really good at something makes you really bad at understanding how you do what you do, and even worse at helping others. Some people are skilled coaches, but many highly able actors are unable to explain how they do it – and that’s okay, because they don’t need to as part of their job.

So very good talented actors often don’t know it, or how they do it, and those actors without much ability don’t know it and so have more confidence in themselves. That’s the scariest thing about talent.