Do I have Talent

The path of learning guitar is full of ups and downs. Everyone has had these down moments, when you’re comparing yourself to all these guitar virtuosos out there, questioning your guitar skills and talent, and hesitating if you should continue playing or if you should give up, because it all seems just like a waste of time Well, let me tell you something: whatever you are learning in life, there will always be people that are better than you. People of different skills and ages, yet better.

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Let’s take school math as an example. We have the young man in twelfth grade, using logarithms and trigonometric functions with ease. He’s not a math genius, just an average student who paid attention during his math classes throughout the years. Then we have the little boy in first grade. He doesn’t know what logarithms are, nor he knows of the existence of trigonometric functions, yet he’s really good in adding numbers and while his classmates can count to 20, he can count to 1 million – a real math genius. However, when you compare them both, disregarding their age, it turns out that average student is “better” than the genius.

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The point is – even talent needs time to be discovered and developed. And even if you find out that you don’t have any talent at all, you can compensate for that with many years of hard work and dedication.

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So basically the math example is absolutely the same when it comes to playing guitar. Of course in real life, we will never compare the twelfth grade student with the boy from first grade, because of their age. However, it’s not the age what makes them different – it’s the years of learning experience. When it comes to guitar playing, we simply forget that every guitar player has a different starting point. Someone may have started playing at the age of 7, another one may have started at 20 and you may have started at the age of 15. If the three of you meet at the age of 21, you won’t have the same playing skills, will you?

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Don’t question yourself if you have talent or not. It’s true that talent will help you develop faster, but you can never compensate 10 years of hard work with 1 year of playing and lots of talent. Sure, you may be achieving your goals for 10 years, while a talented guitarists achieves the same for 7, but after all music is not a competition. It’s an art. You don’t necessarily need to be lightning fast to make good music or to stand out with some other aspect of your guitar technique. You shouldn’t improve your guitar technique just to brag with it. Instead you should do it in order to be able to express yourself the way you want. Because that’s what music is all about – listening to your heart and expressing your feelings.
Harvey Mosley