Talents Undiscovered

Have you ever wondered whether gifted people would have done what they did had they never been exposed to the medium in which they had innate talent? What if Mozart had been born to a tribe of aboriginals? He would never have written or played his magnificent music. Right? I suppose he would have been, at best, a great drummer or singer.

“God given” talents are useless sans an opportunity to develop them and an awareness that we possess them. In a recent blog, “My Pre-screening at the Pearly Gates,” I suggested that our creative intellects connect us, “plug us in,” to the great cosmic intellect, the source of our creativity. How many potential Mozarts never wrote a note because no one “plugged them in.” They never knew. We will never know.

I was fortunate to be blessed with a number of modest talents and developed a few in my life beyond my profession. To these I applied myself vigorously. But what other talents were hidden within me and will remain hidden, as they are hidden within all of us, talents that we never become aware of?

If the letter of commendation I earned as a high schooler from the National Merit Scholarship exam was any indication, my intelligence ranked in the top three percent of all who took the test. But my graduation ranking from college barely placed me in the top 30 percent. Maybe that was because I was too smart. Never having had to study to get good grades in high school, it took me a couple of years of poor college grades to catch on to the fact that, since my classmates were all pretty smart, too, I needed to recognize and develop my untapped “talent” for studying. No matter how gifted we may be, we can develop talents only if we are aware such endeavors exist and that we possess a knack for them. Then we have to risk failure.

One thing I never considered myself to be was a gifted writer. That changed fairly late in life when I submitted an article to the Albany Times Union newspaper that captured the attention of one of their editors.

Robert Brill took the unusual step of taking time out of his busy, hectic day to call me on the phone and to let me know that he felt this piece had potential for excellence. He offered to work with me on improving it. The resulting essay, we both felt, was a truly worthy one. Rob said that this essay. was “explosive“. My response to him was “if you think this is explosive, you should see another I am working on. “ That essay, written as though in the voice of God, advised us human beings we are pathetic morons and that the way we worship Him completely misses the point of spirituality. Rob said he would love to see it. I sent him my draft. After reading it, Rob suggested that if I were interested in availing myself of his editing services, we might be able to turn it into a novel. Me? Write a novel? I’d never imagined I had the potential to achieve such a task, but Rob’s enthusiasm and something inside urged me to give it a try.

That first novel, “Cosmic Casino: The True Word of A. Lester Lord,” was written under a pseudonym both because of the content and because I wasn’t so sure it was really any good. At first the writing actually was not so great, but the process of writing it became a tutorial. As I progressed through it, I could see my potential for the first time. I developed a voice and style that had lain dormant most of my life. More important, Rob helped me to connect my imagination, something I never thought I had a lot of, to the great, universal intelligence. To my utter surprise, there was a decent novel, more than one, and, ultimately, this blog site, inside of me. When you read my scratchings, remember to thank Rob for having plugged me in to the great outlet in the universe that powers my imagination machine and taps in to what writing talent I have.

By the standard measure of a writer’s success, readership, my writing career has been a failure, but no matter. It has been for me personally a source of immense pleasure as, I hope, it has been for you.

We can discover and cultivate our hidden talents only if we risk failure and if someone along the way gives us the courage to take that risk. For me as a writer, that someone was Rob Brill. I can never thank him enough for his having tuned me in to a talent that otherwise may well had never revealed itself to me and to my readers.