Summary:
Someone once said that a *talent* is anything you succeed at doing the first time around. You need to *feed* it to grow though.
Read on the site's launch and the ideas behind it.
:: Feed your talent
Around 2 years old, I underwent a very delicate eye operation that put my working class parents in a very difficult financial situation. They went out to hire the top eye doctor in Montreal. Goal of the operation: to correct my left eye severe strabism. Though strabism doesn't impair your vision - my parents knew it would impair my future. They had an intuition of the days where *looks* were going to almost prevail over *brains*.
Surprisingly, to this day, I have a clear remembrance of that event. In the pre-op moment, the doctor was not only a top specialist in his field but a fine child psychologist and thanks to him not only did he align my eyes but was instrumental to what became my lifelong passion - visual design. I was not scared... just uncomfortable - but I must have become a little restless so before putting me to sleep he talked to me soothingly. Holding a cut off from a newspaper cartoon strip (!) he said that when he would apply it to my eyes, I would start seeing cartoons... now that was interesting and...I believed him!
The operation was a success but in order to strengthen the muscles I would need to exercise my eyes using an ingenious *machine* that would help vision convergence and I guess, keep my straying eye in its new place. Little did I know that he was handing me the most precious gift.
The *machine* was a bulky black metal looking box where a light shone on an area under - it was a mirror trick where I would need to look at pictures. The exercise consisted on tracing over the drawing with a pencil. With the mirror trick - it looked as if I was tracing directly over the printed drawings while I was in fact drawing on an adjacent white pad.
For the next 2 years or so - I did the exercises which must have started with the most simple graphic elements. I remember vividly one particular drawing - that of a house - a square simple little house but I loved that image. Every now and then my parents collated my exercises and showed the eye doctor the results, who evaluated my progress and *adjusted* the black box settings while handling my parents a new set of drawings. Until then - I had no clue how this worked.
One day, my parents showed me the little *house* and were all excited. Mystery - I couldn't understand the excitement and I was kind of bored of the little house by then. Then, with huge grins, they told me *I* had drawn the house! I knew all the drawings were printed and my first reaction while looking at the held drawing was not to believe my parents. I snitched the piece of paper from their hands and looked at it intently. That is when it happened! I saw the *penciled* lines - this was NOT the house drawing I knew - no doubt now - this was my drawing - even saw the little mistakes.
It is hard to express how I felt: disbelief and awe all at once. All along - I had not known that the black box was a drawing exercise. This sure triggered a whole new interest in the black box! First, I asked for more drawings - more complex drawings and then, now that I knew that I was drawing - the challenge became to match these as perfectly as possible. I jumped from active/passive medical therapy to active/active therapy. It was me against the machine.
I would draw - compare the drawing with the original - throw it out and redo it until it was an almost flawless copy. The energy and determination I put into it was fast becoming a passion. By then, my parents didn't really understand my obsession with the black box. I made huge progress, the operation was deemed a success, sometimes after they took the black box away. I kept on drawing.
This is the first time ever I publicly share this story - I want to set a personal and contextual backdrop to this new column. Aycan asked me to share my design experience and we agreed that one topic lacking coverage was how to feed one's talent.
The way each of us encounters the revelation of one's talent could really make a good reading - human diversity is absolutely fascinating. Was it through a personal ordeal or a simple arresting moment? How and most importantly - what you do after the discovery holds the key to a successful design career.
This is not a didactic column with tricks, quick fixes and recipes. It's meant as a non-linear process to recognition of your talent and how to grow it. Hence the title of the column *Feed your talent*.
Somebody once said that a *talent* is anything you succeed at doing the first time around. There is this easiness, grace and elegance, assurance in mindset - you try it - and voilà - you have a result! Be it a béchamel, a tennis service, a Lego airplane, a bird origami, a play-do sculpture or a chord progression. It doesn't mean that you're ready to be introduced as master chef or a new Rodin or Mozart...just yet!!!
Talent starts with a profound, individual awareness. You take a head plunge into granting yourself a measure of value in what you just accomplished — that which holds you raptured to the process and pushes you forward to do more of it. There is an instant delight and fascination for the process of expressing your talent. The decision you take, in having faith in your newly acquired awareness is the GO square. It's the starting point.
Another aspect of talent stems from an urge to *express*. Culture by definition is the *expression of a society*. So talent is motivated by expression. A need, an urge, a compelling motivation to express. Again that motivation is subjected to context, values and knowledge. You can but express just what you know - no more. Education is a boot camp that shapes the rudimentary skills and techniques of a discipline, exposes strengths and weaknesses to peers, aggrandize our base knowledge in the field and does not guarantee a talent growth.
Then what does? What grows and feeds your talent into becoming a lifelong passion, process and career?
Your talent is an ever fragile garden. Nurture, weed and feed it - it will blossom. Take it for granted, go off on ego ware and don't discipline it - it takes but a short time to reach the *status quo* and decline... THAT is the most feared of all places: the talent dead-end!
It takes a real dose of humility to admit that all you know anyway comes from somebody else. How you reinterpret the knowledge of others will become your unique signature as a designer.
The all encompassing tutor of talent is inspiration which needs to be constantly renewed. You need to renew your quest for it and pursue it. This means you need to challenge your limits constantly and apply the same faith in your talent as you did when you discovered it. You have to be able to reinvent yourself. Being a designer is a life project. The role of design is that of a translator. A designer interprets ideas. Usually a career is based on interpretating successfully *others* ideas aka clients.
Suggestions on how to feed your inspiration which will then take your talent to new levels of discovery, joy and satisfaction: research, study, analysis, inspiration, trials, objectivity, results, expertise. DOING!
Written by Carole Guevin for Rough Magazine – April 15, 2003
Published in Creative Behavior Magazine - May 2003