Does Talent Really Matter in Content Creation?

Now that’s an interesting question that I’ve asked myself on a rainy Sunday afternoon!

Let me get around to answering it…

I’m a person who believes that no two people are alike.

I also happen to believe in an Abrahamic Creator God who made people distinct, and blessed them with some talents or natural abilities.

So, you can see where I’m going with this!

Is writing a skill or is it a talent, and does that really matter for content creation?

When one writes professionally, as I do, it isn’t about talent at all. It’s got more to do with skill, years of experience, overall knowledge and a good grasp of the language in which you are communicating the content.

Creative professions are very challenging, as those engaged in them already know. They involve dedication and constant mental stimulation to produce the best-in-class content. After all, we all want to be known as pathbreaking content creators and not mere copycats.

As a result, we do put a lot of pressure on ourselves to perform.

Content creation for a digital marketing agency doesn’t require copious amounts of talent, just good journalistic research skills, an ability to grasp topics quickly, and sufficient ideation ability.

With these, you can sketch a 1500-word article within an hour’s time and have the work done in 4. I say this because I know. In a digital marketing agency, we cater to several clients and our content needs to be produced quickly, correctly and accurately.

While you don’t require much talent to do this, you do require skills. So that answers the question I posed to myself earlier on. In the industry it’s skills that matter, not talent.

However, what about other pieces of content creation? Like novels, short stories, poems, movies and other art forms?

In this case, skill may be useful, but talent blows one’s mind away.

You know a good work of art when you see one. Everybody does. There is something so crazily beautiful about an artist’s perception of the world that it can “remain” with you for life.

This happened to me for the first time when I read Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina. I was mentally disturbed for weeks on end. I’d read stories on adultery before, having gone through part one of Madame Bovary and Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence, but there was something about this particular story that simply blew my mind. That, I believe, is talent. It’s innate, sealed within one’s soul from the start.

Anna Karenina, is the work of an author, now long dead. Yet, the words he left behind are still enigmatic and influential to this day. How can it be? And yet it is!

I’d like to say now that if you have the slightest affinity for writing, just believe you have the talent. Even if no one believes in you, you should believe in yourself. God gives us enough to thrive, so just claim that and continue writing.

But do hone your innate talent.

Use it and it will sharpen of its own accord.

So, to sum up, skills for the industry, talent for the arts.