Welcome to the Listening Time podcast.
Hey everybody, this is Connor and you're listening to episode 167 of the Listening Time podcast.
I hope you're all doing great.
I hope that your English learning is going well and that you're staying consistent with it.
And I hope you've enjoyed the new phrasal verb episodes. that I've been releasing.
I really hope that you like that format as well and that you're able to do even more listening practice now, because now you have two episodes per week with the transcript.
And of course you're learning phrasal verbs specifically with those other episodes, but it's still listening practice.
So I hope you've been enjoying those so far.
And in today's episode, We're going to talk about talent.
So this is an interesting topic because many people talk about what the difference is between someone who is talented at something and someone who had to work really hard to get good at something, and what the difference is and how, how these two things work talent and hard work right.
So I thought that this would be an interesting concept to talk about, and I'll talk a little bit in general about that, and I'll talk about what I'm talented at, in my opinion, and what I'm definitely not talented at.
So I'm sure that you'll enjoy hearing about that, the things that come natural to me and the things that don't.
By the way, when we say that something comes naturally to someone, or We're saying that it's natural for them to do it.
They have a natural ability to do that thing.
So you'll hear what comes naturally to me and what definitely doesn't.
And remember that you can start using my advanced podcast episodes if you feel ready.
In those episodes, I speak at normal speed.
So you have the opportunity to practice with native English, with real English that's spoken fast.
So that's definitely the next step for you.
You should challenge yourself with that type of content to help you reach a higher level where you can actually practice understand people when they speak normally.
So if you go down below and click on the link to sign up, you can become a Listening Time family member if you want those advanced episodes.
You'll get two every month.
So you can go down and sign up if you're interested.
And you can also sign up for my U.S.
Conversations podcast, if you want to practice with two people talking and not just one.
In that podcast I talk to people from all over the country about different topics, about different cities and states in the US.
It's really interesting.
It's really fun.
And of course, I provide the transcript for that.
So if you're interested in that, The link is also down below.
All right, let's get started.
Are your ears ready?
You know what time it is.
It's listening time.
Okay, let's talk about talent.
So first of all, what is talent?
Well, Talent is a natural ability that allows someone to excel at something without needing to work as hard.
So if someone is naturally better at something than the average person, let's say, and they don't need to practice quite as much in order to reach a higher level, then I think we can safely say that that person is talented in that area.
If someone doesn't have that natural ability in some field, some domain, some skill and they have to work really hard in order to improve like they have to work harder than the average person does then we would probably say that that person is is not talented in that specific skill.
So in my opinion, I think that we all have at least one talent.
I think we probably all have more than one.
But let's just say that we all have at least one.
And I've heard some people say, I'm just not talented.
I'm not talented at anything.
And I don't think that's true.
I think that that just means that that person hasn't really considered all of their strengths, because talent is isn't just related to sports or music or things like that.
For example, you might be talented at cooking.
Or you might be talented at hospitality, like making people feel at home when they come visit you at your house.
So that might not be something that people even realize that counts as a talent, but it does, right?
Anything that you have a natural ability to do well, without needing to maybe work as hard at it as other people.
Maybe you don't struggle as much as other people.
That's a talent.
So I encourage all of you to consider your talents and think about what things you're naturally good at.
I think that that's a good exercise for us to consider our own talents, and it's a very common thing for people to look at others and maybe talk about their talents without knowing if they're actually talented at those things or if they had to work really hard at those things, right.
I can think of a few areas in which I hear this a lot One of them is language learning.
So I've heard a lot of people who have never studied a language or they've never succeeded in learning a language.
They often say this.
They say, you're really talented at learning languages or he's a very talented language learner.
And yes, sometimes the person has a more natural ability to learn languages.
However, that I think is not the biggest factor here.
And I think that that really discounts.
It kind of disregards all of the time that this person spends language learning.
I don't consider myself a talented language learner.
I think that I'm probably just average at it.
However, I've spent a decent amount of time learning languages, like when I learned Spanish.
I spent tons of hours with Spanish.
And so some people have told me that I'm a talented language learner just because I learned Spanish to a pretty high level, but they're disregarding all of the hours that I put into that language.
By the way, we say that you put time into something to mean that you dedicate time to that thing.
So, when they say that to me, they're kind of disregarding all the time I put into learning Spanish.
And another thing to consider with language learning is that Once you learn one foreign language, it's easier to learn more.
That's a phenomenon, that happens, and so sometimes you'll see someone who has learned three foreign languages, for example, and you don't realize that after the first foreign language, the other two were actually much easier for that person to learn.
So it's not just that they have talent.
They might have talent for sure, but if they spend a lot of time learning languages, it's very possible for them to first learn one with a lot of hard work and then learn another one and learn another one, and the process gets more familiar and easier with each language.
So it's not just talent, right.
And in sports sometimes people talk about this athlete is naturally talented or that athlete isn't as naturally talented, he had to work harder.
And really it's kind of hard to determine that right, because all athletes at the professional level had to work hard to reach that level.
So it's kind of hard to tell who was talented and who wasn't as talented, because they all worked hard to reach a high level.
I think of my aunt, for example.
She was an amazing tennis player when she was younger.
She actually reached the ranking of number two in California, if I'm not mistaken, when she was in high school.
And it would be easy to just say that she was talented at tennis.
However, that would completely disregard the hundreds and hundreds or thousands of hours that she dedicated to tennis right.
So I don't know if it was more talent or hard work, right?
And one other area that I think people often like to say that someone is just naturally talented in is public speaking.
And yes, some people are naturally talented when it comes to public speaking.
But people that are talented, they still train.
If they want to become professional speakers or politicians or people who make speeches a lot, they still have to train a lot.
And someone who's not naturally talented speaker can probably reach the same level, the same high level, just by working really hard.
So I think that it's kind of hard to distinguish whether it was talent or hard work or what percentage of each thing caused someone to reach a certain level.
I view talent as the thing that helps orient us.
When something orients you, it kind of moves you into the right position or going in the right direction.
Talent orients us towards what we will be good at eventually if we do it.
It's the thing that helps us maybe choose what to do, because it is something we're naturally doing, interested in, or it's something that we can do easily.
And so that kind of helps show us maybe what direction we should go in in terms of our career or hobbies or whatever.
And then hard work is really what helps us reach great success.
It helps us reach a high level of in that area.
So talent can maybe push us to go further in a certain area, but hard work is really what helps us succeed and reach a high level.
Okay, now let me talk about things that i'm talented at.
In my opinion, I wrote down three things here.
The first thing is writing.
Writing has always come naturally to me.
I worked as a writing tutor, even for a little while, and I helped foreigners in the US with their essay writing, and that was a very natural job for me.
I remember being in school and seeing how much my classmates struggled with their essay writing and it was baffling to me really.
By the way, the word baffling means really confusing or perplexing.
I was baffled by how hard it was for people to write essays.
It seemed like such an easy task for me, but almost everyone I knew had trouble with this.
When that's the case, that usually means that you're talented in that area, because I didn't practice writing essays all the time.
It was just something that came naturally to me.
And I'm not saying that I love writing essays, for example, but I like writing in general.
I like creative writing.
I like writing poetry and songs and things like that.
So that's a good indication that I'm talented at it.
I can make things sound pretty good in written form.
However, I'm not saying that I'm a really gifted writer or anything like that.
I don't think I'll ever write a very good, successful novel, for example.
I'd love to complete a novel at some point in my life, but if I do, I don't think it'll be that great.
I don't think my talent compares to famous authors' talents, of course.
Definitely not.
However, it's something...
I feel like I have a natural ability in.
I can write pretty easily.
So that's a talent that I have.
Another talent that I think that I have this is one that you probably wouldn't think of when trying to just think of your talents and that is reading people.
When we say that you read someone, we're saying that you can analyze them and determine maybe, what they feel, what they're thinking, how they feel in a particular situation.
So when I'm in social situations, I can usually look at the people around me that I'm interacting with, and I feel like I can read them more easily than other people can.
I feel like I can empathize with them and I can talk to them, I think, based on my reading of them.
Sometimes I watch other people interact and I can see that one of those people, like one of the two people in the conversation, is not reading the other person well and, like the other person, is maybe uncomfortable or not interested in the conversation or whatever.
And I can't believe that the other person can't see this.
They can't read the person they're talking to and see that that person does not want to talk to them, or that person is not interested in that subject or whatever.
That's something that I pick up on really easily.
When you pick up on something, this means that you can identify it.
You can identify that specific thing.
So I can pick up on that really easily when I see other people talking and one person is not reading the other person.
Well, that's really obvious to me.
So that's why I would say that one of my talents is reading people.
And one other talent I was able to think of.
This one is kind of a random one, not really important, but I think that I'm talented at racket sports.
I haven't played all of these sports like at a high level or anything.
The only one that I really practiced for years was tennis.
But sometimes I have the opportunity to play ping pong or even badminton or like paddle ball at the beach or whatever.
And it's pretty clear that this is something important that I'm naturally drawn to like.
I like these sports.
When you're drawn to something, that means that you're attracted to it.
So I'm naturally drawn to these types of sports and it just feels pretty easy for me to play them.
So that's a good indication that that I have some talent when it comes to these types of sports.
But that's maybe not the most important talent.
I don't really value that talent that much.
Okay, what am I not talented at?
I wrote down a few things that I'm definitely not talented at.
The first one is art.
So I can compare myself to my sister, for example, who is an art teacher.
That's what she does, and she's an artist, you could say.
My sister really took to art as a kid.
When you take to something, this means that when you start it, you have a natural liking for it and a natural ability to do that thing.
So my sister took to art and I did not.
Uh, and I'm still horrible today when it comes to art, and it's not fun for me either.
So I'm a terrible artist.
I can't draw, I can't paint, I can't do anything like that, but my sister can, for example, and we grew up in the same house, the same environment, so you can see that she had a natural talent for that, and she still does, of course, and i definitely don't.
So that's one.
Another thing that i'm definitely not talented at is cooking.
When I'm in the kitchen, I am completely lost.
I don't belong in there at all.
When I help cook, that's very rare, but sometimes I will help with the cooking process.
On those occasions, I usually make things worse.
I usually actually hurt the process instead of helping it.
I can't do things correctly.
I don't have the natural ability to use my hands to cut or slice or do things like that.
It's like I lack common sense in the kitchen.
I can't do basic things.
By the way, when we say that you lack something, that means that you don't have it.
Okay, so I lack common sense in and I lack the basic skills that you need to cook.
And when I try to cook, I do it extremely slowly.
It takes me a really long time to do different things, especially cutting and preparing things like vegetables.
That takes me forever.
So I'm definitely not talented at cooking.
And one other thing I'm definitely not talented at is cardio activities.
So in other words, like running or doing something like that for long distances without stopping.
I've always been really bad at this.
This has never come naturally to me.
Even when I played sports, like in high school, when I played basketball, I always got tired from running back and forth more easily than my teammates did.
And I was never good at swimming long distances.
I was never good at running long distances, even though I'm trying to get better at that now.
It's something that I've never been good at.
It's never been a natural thing for me.
And I remember like playing soccer, for example.
And when I had to play in the midfield, like the people in the middle that have to run a lot, this was really hard for me.
I hated being in the midfield.
So as you can see, cardio activities are something that I'm not talented at.
However, like I said, I'm trying to work hard at running so that I can get better.
So even if there's something that you're definitely not talented at, you can still work really hard and actually get better at that thing.
That's something good that we can all do.
So I think that's it for today.
I hope you enjoyed this episode and I hope it got you thinking about the things that you're talented at.
And, of course, you can use my advanced podcast episodes if you feel ready to practice with English spoken at normal speed.
So go down below and click on the link to sign up. to become a Listening Time family member.
And you'll get two new advanced episodes every month with the transcript, of course.
And you can also use my US Conversations podcast if you feel ready to practice listening to two people talking.
And it's really fun.
It's really interesting.
And you have the transcript for those episodes as well.
So The link to sign up is also down below.
And you have the transcript for this episode down below as well.
All right.
Thank you for listening to this episode.
And I'll talk to you on the next episode of Listening Time.
