What is talent and how does a genius live

If a person is talented, then much is available to him in life, at least, so it is considered.

Talents and child prodigies

Usually, special abilities are manifested in childhood. Young talent easily copes with the tasks, which sometimes have to be rushed by mature specialists. Such gifted children even came up with a special name - "geeks" (from German - an amazing child).

Those who do not shine abilities, jokes tease "Kinderwood", which from the same German language is translated as "child-tree." Gifted children, growing up, rarely become geniuses. Spoiled with praise and accustomed to the fact that everything is given to them easily, they are defenseless against the harsh realities of the adult world, and the need to work hard often causes them to protest and disgust.

Abilities and work

What is talent buried in the ground? It is clear that special abilities for a certain type of activity are, in modern economic terms, an intangible asset. With him, you can not do manipulation, as with some thing. It means that the ancient monetary unit (1 talent = 6 thousand drachmas), buried as a treasure, is withdrawn from the useful turnover and does not bring profit.

So an immaterial, but very important gift should be in perpetual motion, otherwise its value, unlike the denomination of a precious coin buried in the ground, will not be preserved, and there is no question of utility in this case. When asked about what talent is, one brilliant musician replied that this is a proportion of abilities, and all the rest is a huge amount of work.

A scientific approach to finding talent

In addition, whatever the talent, it requires identification. It's great if the parents understand that the child has special abilities, during his early childhood, and will make an effort to develop them. For example, the father of Wolfgang Mozart taught his children music from childhood, sometimes very hard forcing them to do musical notation, solfeggio and other, at first glance, boring things.

To put on a scientific basis the identification of abilities in early childhood, educators and sociologists have been trying for several past decades. In the 80s of the 20th century G. Gardner's book Frames of Mind was published, in which he classified people's inclinations to different kinds of activities and defined what talent is in applying to the future profession, having identified eight of its main types. Giftedness can be manifested in verbal-linguistic, digital, spatial, physical, personal, interpersonal directions, as well as in a person's relationship with the natural environment.

Such a classification, however, despite its apparent universality, does not answer the questions about what talent is, what are its boundaries, where it comes from and why talented people are surprisingly versatile.

Riddle and tragedy of geniuses

It is believed that great writers reach a peak of creativity at about the age of thirty, when they acquire a certain life experience. However, early works of some poets and writers sometimes surprise with maturity of thoughts and wisdom, usually uncharacteristic of youth.

As a rule, the best talents of the world lived brightly, but not for long, and their fate can not be called prosperous. God's gift is not only the happiness of creativity, but also a huge load. The need to express something that overflows the soul can not be contained, and the process of creating a masterpiece is very painful. In addition, the artist's subtle soul is always keenly aware of the envy of untalented colleagues in the shop and the rejection of the inhabitants.

Great Russian talents, enriched world culture, are no exception. If we list only the poets who lived in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, it remains to be mournfully surprised at the tragic fate of Pushkin, Lermontov, Griboyedov, Esenin, Mayakovsky, Blok, Mandelstam, Brodsky and many others. Well, this is the fate of genius, heavy, but still happy.