Talent is overrated

Stop asking what you're good at

Talent is a compliment we pay to work we didn’t see being made.

We see the finished thing. We don’t see the sweat behind it. The ugly first attempts, the late nights, the years of figuring it out. So we call it a gift.

Then we do the same to ourselves, the other way round. I’m the creative one. I’m not a numbers person. I could never code. We say these things like they’re facts about our bodies. Most of them come from one bad teacher or one ugly first try, years ago. We never checked again.

For a long time, the labels made sense. They made you easy to hire, easy to bill, easy to promote. The deeper you went into your label, the more you got paid. So we started to believe the label was who we are. It was just how we got paid.

Then learning got free.

When I taught myself web design, the only useful resource I could find was Lynda.com. A paid library of video tutorials, later bought by LinkedIn. That was the only door, and you paid to walk through it.

Today you need nothing. No money, no permission, no degree. AI will sit with you at two in the morning and answer your most embarrassing questions without judging you. If you want to learn something, the only real cost is your evenings.

Which means one skill now matters more than every other. The skill of figuring it out. Sitting with something you don’t know how to do, staying there, and finding a way through. It sounds too basic to call a skill. It’s underneath every skill you’ve ever built.

I saw this clearly over the past few months. We’ve been hiring a senior designer, and I’ve read through hundreds of applications. Two extremes keep showing up.

Young designers with barely any portfolio, applying with genuinely poor work. Being at the start is fine. Everyone starts rough. But the best studios in the world publish everything they do, for free. You can study their work for hours and learn more than any course will teach you. The work in my inbox tells me nobody looked.

And on the other side, very experienced designers. Fifteen, twenty years in. Big names on the CV. The work is genuinely good. But it hasn’t moved in a decade. Somewhere along the way, they stopped being hungry to figure things out. Comfort does that. It arrives quietly and looks like success.

Different people, same missing piece. And that should be encouraging, because the missing piece can be trained. Figuring it out works like a muscle. It doesn’t care how old you are or how senior your title is. It fades when you stop and it comes back when you start again. The juniors can start today. The seniors can start again today. The muscle holds no grudges.

So train it on purpose.

Study the best work in the open. Pick one piece you admire and pull it apart until you understand every choice in it.

Ask AI the questions you’d be embarrassed to ask a person. They cost nothing now.

And pick the one thing you’ve spent years saying you’re bad at. Give it two honest weeks.

Through all of it, be kind to yourself. Don’t stand over your own shoulder grading every attempt. You try, you learn, you adjust, you try again. That’s the whole loop. Nobody figures anything out while busy judging themselves for not knowing it yet.

You’ll be clumsy at first. Good. Clumsy means the muscle is working.

Because the real training is bigger than any single skill. It’s teaching your mind to stop thinking in labels at all. The UX person. The motion person. The business person. The strategy person. Those walls are melting, and they won’t come back. What’s growing on the other side is a different kind of creative. Someone who moves between disciplines instead of living inside one only. Someone who can orchestrate, adapt and evolve with whatever comes next.

Nothing about you is fixed. That was the whole misunderstanding.

Keep figuring it out.

Love. Stef.