What s the difference between Talent and Skill?- Ask Nathan by How to be Second

What is the difference between talent and skill? Nathan lays out his four-part formula for skill: talent, practice, technique, and “war” (battle-tested experience). He argues that raw talent alone won’t cut it, and why going it alone is a losing strategy. The throughline? Go together, get a coach, and take more shots than feels comfortable. 

Hey, this is Nathan Young, founder and author of How to be Second, and this is Ask Nathan, where I answer questions about being and growing as a second in command + a Second by identity, and tear apart myths around those ideas and other concepts. I’m practicing communicating the value of Seconds so you can do so for yourself and others, with even more clarity.

Transcript

Nathan Young 0:00

Hey, this is Nathan Young. Founder and author of How to Be Second, and this is Ask Nathan where I answer questions about being and growing as a second in command and a second by identity and tear apart myths around those ideas and other concepts. I'm practicing communicating the value of seconds, so you can do so for yourself and others with even more clarity. If you're curious and wanna know more, listen on. If you know you're ready to invest in yourself and go together, connect with us.

0:30

All right, Nathan. I have a question for you. How are talent and skill different? Let me tell you. You've asked me a couple of questions that I had to really think about for a minute. This one, I have a theory loaded up. We're watching the Olympics right now, and there are so many people I've already heard commentators say a dozen times. Oh my gosh. So talented. So talented. Well, and then the immediate response, right? Yes and, thousands, tens of thousands of hours of intentional practice. So I'm like, sure, but there are also people who have invested tens of thousands of hours who suck. Like they're not good. So wait, so hold on. There must be more to this, right? It can't just be the practice, but the talent thing also like rings somewhere, right? So I went, okay, let's break down talent. Now we know, I have a bunch of books on my shelf downstairs that talk about the idea of talent being an innate born thing, and at How to be Second we buy into this idea. We say there are innate or born things. There's nothing you can do about it. And so this idea that you do have some things that are part of who you are and there's really nothing to be done. So clearly talent is a real actual thing. You don't become LeBron by practicing your ass off. LeBron is a special breed of human being. Kobe was, Jordan was right. And so talent must be a real thing. So then if talent is, what must skill be? And I have a four part like, dial for skill. Like these are the four pieces that make up what skill is. The first one is talent. The second one is practice. So the first two that people talk about all the time, ah, talent, ah, I practice, right? Yes. Those are the first two things. The next one is technique cause you can have people who have practiced very intentionally and have raw talent, but they've practiced shitty. They don't have any technique, and we can watch that happen. Like in amateur sport, you see people who you're like, oh my gosh. If you could just polish that, that person would just go to the next level. And that's part of the reason we have coaches and why coaches are so valued. So clearly there's something in technique. We were just talking the other day about like how there's this quad guy in the figure skating, and he is landing consistently quads, which was impossible. Till about eight years ago. Right? Yeah. So a triple was impressive. And now this guy can land quads like constantly. What happened there? Well clearly he's incredibly talented, and yes, clearly he's put in all the practice, but also technique has evolved. And so that must be part of it. Tony Hawk was the very first person to do a 900, and now every kid in the skate park can pull off a 900 on a vert ramp. And then the last one is war. And so the shocking thing I think about war is that it almost stands on its own in how good a person can become at something. Because war doesn't care and it almost is like it teaches you different things. I just remember in taking martial arts when I was younger, I remember there's like, there's fighting in the dojo and then there's like fighting. They're not the same thing. And so like you can learn to be really good at martial arts in a dojo, and then you'll get your ass kicked by some random punk who's just gotten in lots of street fights. They're different. And so have you actually been to war? Have you had to battle test, pressure test the talent or the practice or the techniques that you have gathered. And if you have consistently been to war, you can probably beat the snot out of someone who has talent and technique and practice. But if you've constantly been to war, like you'll probably win. So those four things are what determine what skill is. Talent is just one piece of all of that. Can you give a very Secondy example of how we conflate this idea of talent and skill? Yeah. Frustratingly. Um, so we do matchmaking. I mean, I hear every story you can imagine, while we're doing this matchmaking stuff 'cause we're working with first in commands typically who have either had Seconds, second in commands, or haven't yet but have heard lots of stories. We put job postings out. We're very thoughtful and considered about those postings, about crafting them, about like trying to find the right person. 'Cause money attracts everyone. And something consistently that we've been battling in the community is that being this person makes you qualified for every role that looks like this. Because the jacket fits your body so well. And my response so consistently has been like, Hey, you are talented. So a question is, do you have the other three? Right? Like, have you put in the intentional practice? Do you have any actual experience? Like yes, I understand that you're a Second. You are a natural, you are gifted, you're talented at this thing. So like LeBron, when he was a child, you are not yet fit to play in the NBA Have you put in the thousands of intentional practice hours? Have you been to war for however many years? Have you gotten the shit kicked out of you? Have you had a business go bankrupt under your watch? And so yeah, this is the thing that I fight constantly. I'm like, oh, you don't know how to read the three financial statements. You're not qualified, you cannot have this role. You don't have the techniques, you haven't put in the practice. And if you don't know how to read the three basic financial statements you from damn sure haven't been to war. So like, I'm not putting you with anyone. You scare the shit outta me. Absolutely not. I will not stand behind your skill. I'll stand behind your talent but not your skill. So question. Yeah. If you are missing one of those things, how do you get it? Go together is the first answer. I was talking to this guy today who owns a company. It's got 90 people. He's just talking about all of the brutal learning and whatever, and he's an athlete. And something he said, I actually sideways tangented him for like 20 minutes about this today. And he was like, i've always had coaches. That made everything survivable was 'cause I've always had a coach. A hundred percent of the time I've had a coach. And he's like, I feel like I've invested in an obscene amount of money into making sure that I had a coach all the time and I don't feel like it's enough. I asked him, I was like, do you feel like you have an edge? Because as an athlete, you've never once questioned the idea that you should be going together. And he is like, I have more than an edge. I have put people in the ground past what they were capable of surviving because I knew to go together with a coach and other people. And so that's my first answer is go together. Stop trying to figure it out your own damn self. That can look like lots of things. Go together, can look like friends. It can look like a coach. You should have a coach. Everyone should have a coach. You should have at least one coach, at least one. You should have a personal coach and a professional coach. And you can obviously dig into like educational resources, right? You're not self-taught, you just don't give credit to your teachers. So like going on YouTube is not being self-taught. It's being taught by a bunch of teachers you forgot how to name. And so like go get taught by people. And then go see if you can go to war somewhere. Right. That's what a portfolio is. It's what free work is for. It's the purpose of internships is to go to war. But like go do some fucking work and have a chance that you get your ass kicked. And like get a coach. Get a coach. Get a coach. Again, I'm just not sure how you feel about the coaching thing. Can you just like be a little more clear real quick? Yeah. Yeah. So that's how you, that's how you do it. Get a, get a coach. When you were talking about the four components, the one that stood out to me the most was the technique, and so I'm curious. I just had this idea in my head of like, not knowing your technique is bad until you get embarrassed. Right. Like one of those embarrassing moments, I have an example. Okay. Yeah. I was just gimme your, I'm unpack. Lived my lived example. Yeah. Gimme your lived experience. I was a chef. In a crazy turn of events, I went from being the assistant pastry chef at a multimillion dollar country club to being the executive chef in 24 hours. We don't need to go into the details. It was incredibly messed up. I know the details. It was messed up. Okay. It's definitely one of those things I should have said no to, but I said yes. Okay, we'll leave it at that. My first day being the executive chef, I had no idea what I was doing. So I simply tried to mimic what I had seen the old chef doing, which was he would take a stack of invoices or papers or whatever, go sit at the table in the middle of the entire kitchen and people would just buzz around him. So that's what I did 'cause I didn't know. And someone came up to me, and was like, what are you doing? And I was like, I'm doing the job. And they were like, they need help. And I was like mortified. I was mortified. Okay. I did not realize I had bad technique. Yeah. And so I then needed to recover and it took me a while to recover 'cause I didn't know how to recover. Hmm. And so in those moments when you realize everything you're modeling after or who taught you that it was bad technique, what the heck do you do to recover better? Because it, I feel like it's gonna happen. Oh yeah. Oh yeah. So I'm not saying avoid it. I think that's bad advice, actually. Yeah. How do you, I agree. Don't avoid it. How do you recover better? Yeah. Uh, I agree. Don't avoid it. One of the things that first in commands have on us is most one ics, not first in commands, one ics. This identity we talk about as sort of our opposite, right? One of the things they have on us is this incredible risk tolerance. Their ready, fire, aim is like, that's not even it. They're just fire. There's no ready, there's no aim. It's just fire. The thing about them is they get so many shots at being so shit and then recovering from that. Right. It's like they just have an infinite ammo and so they're just, well, if you are willing to shoot a thousand bullets, if you have a 1% accuracy, damn you hit 10 shots, right? So that would be my first thing is not only don't avoid it, you need to go do some shit where you can fail a lot fast. And so like get used to it. The second thing is, once you go, oh, I am fully stuck, what do you do after that? And the answer is get a coach. Get a coach. Get coach. And what if you have a shitty coach? Because lots of people are coaches and I think a decent amount of the problem with Seconds getting coaches is that Seconds learn to be pretty good at things so fast that they're like, well, I'm better than my coach now, which. It is probably true in some aspects and also time and war, right? Right. Like, yeah, your techniques might be better, but you have not been to war. Go with someone who has been to war. So, I'm gonna lean back on that idea of go do some free work or go find a role where you can like get near somebody who is really good at that thing or go ask those people where you can get some coaching or development or whatever. I mean, like some of the best schools in the world are the best schools in the world for a reason. So all of those would be my answer is like. How do you recover from those things faster? And the answer is you have to go fail. And you have to go fail a bunch 'cause it's a muscle, the recovery muscle is a muscle. And then, I mean, I'm, I'm not excited about my answer. I'm don't want to do what I am saying. I just have to, right. How many shots do I take? How much convincing energy do I use up constantly making sure that How to be Second can be. Oh my God. Way past my limit all the time. And I fail all the time and it's fucking awful. And then you do it again, and then you do it again, and then you do it again like uh, and so it's that. And then I think the last probably thing for Seconds is like, it doesn't have anything to do with technique. It has a lot more to do with war. And sort of the inspiration, and that is like you have to find that person or those people that inspire you, right? Like yeah, you have to find that. Well, that's an uplifting way to end when the last two minutes I've hated everything you've said. Yeah, so we're gonna end it right there. Me too. I also hated everything I said. I was like, damn. I know. This is the answer. It is awful. Can't I just go learn a bunch of like special things about lines and boxes from a book in a closet and then come out as a genius who knows everything and is perfect at everything. And I never fail even once, and I never have to deal with that. And can't I just do that. Every time you say the word failure, I black out. Yeah, that's right.

Nathan Young 14:25

Hey, it's Nathan again. If you made it to the end, that's awesome. If you have a question, shoot it over to contact @howtobesecond.com if you're glad this work exists and want it to continue existing, you can support how to be second at howtobesecond.com /support Thanks again, i'm looking forward to your next question.