Noel Manuel
An extraordinary power lies within each of us. It is a power like no other. It becomes powerful when we allow it to grow. And turns powerless when we fail to acknowledge its presence. This power is our identity of the past, hope of our present and persona of our future. The power of our talent is unimaginable. The more time that is put into nurturing it, the bigger and healthier it gets. It becomes the source of our identity and the reason of our success.
Talent has its different forms and identities. But it knows only one language. The language of success. Every success story of the past bears the inscriptions of talent and the success that is attributed to it.
We are all born with a talent within us. It is a gift to support our identity. How we choose to use this talent depends on the direction we have chosen to take. There is only one direction that we can direct our talent towards - success.
Why are some people more talented than others? What makes men like Nobel Prize winner Albert Einstein or child prodigies like Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart so outstanding? The answers to these age-old questions are helping scientists to learn more about talent – and to understand why some people have more than others.
If you’ve always thought of highly gifted children as little geniuses, maybe you should think again. Psychologists use the term ‘precocious,’ which simply means that these children possess abilities that do not correspond with those of their age group. These boys and girls not only fascinate their friends and families but are a vital link in helping scientists understand the elusive phenomenon of talent.
From an early age, gifted children are capable of exceptional achievements. They learn quickly and efficiently, think as adults do, juggle formulae from mathematics or physics and often learn to read by themselves or learn their way round a computer keyboard by the time they are old enough to go to school. Such children often stand out from others in the areas of science, literature, music, painting and sports.
In music, for example, many a famous virtuoso was brilliant performer as a child. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791) learned to play the harpsichord at the age of four, composed his first sonata at the age of six and wrote his first opera, Bastien and Bastienne, at the age of 12. The talented Italian painter, Prima Conti, was born around 1900, and painted his first self-portrait at the age of 11. At the 1976 Olympic games in Montreal, Canada, the 14-year-old Rumanian gymnast Nadia Comaneci was the first to achieve two perfect 10s – the dream score.
Leslie Lemke is a spastic. He can hardly speak and is considered mentally retarded. To make matters even worse, he was blindfolded just a few months after his birth. These impediments, however, have not prevented Leslie from becoming a musical genius. As soon as he sits down at a piano, he has the amazing talent to mesmerize an audience. Whether he is performing hymns, concertos or popular tunes, Leslie plays everything perfectly, even though he has never studied music. He has a wonderfully developed musical ‘ear,’ and only has to hear a piece of music once in order to play it. After that, he can perform it perfectly.
You don’t have to be a genius to possess a particular gift for numbers – or other extraordinary intelligence. Twins Charles and George could name the day of the week for any randomly selected calendar date – in addition to coping with several other complex mathematical challenges. And yet both were classified as ‘mentally retarded.’ A test carried out in 1964, when the brothers were 24 years old, indicated an IQ between 60 and 70, against the normal average of 100. their mental development was assessed as being at the same level.
What is a talent? The best evidence that there are varying levels of intelligence may be seen in the question of talent. The modern world has seen great strides in many fields of science, with top physicists or natural scientists attracting public attention and acclaim. Perhaps the most renowned 20th century scientist was the German-born physicist Albert Einstein (1879-1955), whose general theory of relativity revolutionized our understanding of the laws of physics and the universe. Many of Einstein’s contemporaries were also remarkably knowledgeable, and perhaps just as creative, inventive and intelligent, but Einstein stood out from the crowd because of his talent. His work, his results and his ideas decisively changed our picture of the world and our philosophy.
Talent, by and large, is the foundation to any achievement or accomplishment. And we need to spot our talent early on to achieve our accomplishments.
noelmanuel@rediffmail.com
The writer is the Coordinator of the Northeast Region (Poetry Society of India) and Life Member of the Poetry Society of India. Journalist and Correspondent Eastern Panorama (News Magazine of the Northeast) Phonetics Teacher.
