“Talent is a pursued interest. Anything that you're willing to practice, you can do.” - Bob Ross

The Talent Code book says exactly this. It boils down to what one practices mindfully and obsessively - the brain adapts to get better at that thing.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/5771014-the-talent-code

I've always thought of this as the discovery of an aspect of talent, that people who'd be described as talented simply discovered by chance earlier, and isn't mutually exclusive with the act of learning it deliberately.

As in, if you have some innate predisposition towards creative thought, it'll be a Schrödinger's cat until you find some way to explore it. Someone with innately great coordination and the right build might have a higher rate of success in learning to climb or play billiards, but if they've never tried to get good at either, then until that time comes they're evidently not good or bad at either. Likewise someone who is a virtuoso violinist may or may not also succeed at swimming because some aspect of how they got good at violin carries over, but if they have no interest or exposure they'd never discover that or care if they did.

For example, I know a pro _____ who also happens to be incredibly good at aiming a frisbee. He almost certainly practiced it—since he got a dog—but his disposition was toward coordination and aim oriented things, which likely helped reduce the amount of practice needed to reach a higher ceiling than someone who's deeply clumsy might. Incidentally, he's also very good at illustration, which again he practiced before it became a medium of expression, and maybe shared an aspect of relentless determination and creativity that also came through in his sport of choice.

The skills that you are treating as innate may be a lot more learnable than you think. The first time I did micro-soldering (soldering things on the scale of 1 mm) when I was an EE, my hands shook a lot, and I basically just tried to figure out how to catch the soldering iron in the right place while it waved around. After doing more micro-soldering, people later complimented my "very steady hands" when soldering small things, and they were very steady. Since then, being able to aim things precisely has carried over. I walked on to the NCAA fencing team at school and was good enough to go to several meets largely because I am 6'3" and left-handed, and could accurately aim the point of an epee at small targets. I also later have been target shooting a bit, and was told I did a lot better than most new shooters.

I have fantastic fine motor control thanks to piano playing, but I am very clumsy otherwise. I regularly run into doorways and have near-misses with static objects. The fencing coach found this hilarious. I assume the fine motor control comes from practice (while most people learned to not run into doors, I studied the blade).

Certain aspects of this stuff are innate, but I think a lot less of it is than most people do. Those innate things do seem to include "speed at which you learn new stuff," as well as very basic parameters of your body like reflexes, bone density, and body shape.

Ya, I agree, but would clarify that I was mainly exploring a few real examples to illustrate my take on it, rather than intending to state those abilities were concretely innate, which I don't think they are.

The superficial difference between someone who may be "talented" and "highly skilled" seems to me to be indistinguishable without more context about how the skills came to be, and for most people who just aren't as pedantic, the term talented is just synonymous with skilled, imho.

In situations where two people of the same age, interest, and approximately similar exposure, resources, and build, are compared, it would come down to progress made between start and end of engaging in an activity without prior deliberate practice that to me would indicate some innate predisposition to do whatever it is that's advantaged by it. I watched two people my age grow up skateboarding into adulthood. Both came out highly skilled and with some amateur/pro success, but one had to grind much harder and took more damage in the process, while the other took a non-zero amount of serious damage, and seemingly picked new abilities up within a few goes. I think this accumulation of prerequisites has an aggregate cost that potentially detracts at at varying rates from each subsequent opportunity to pock something else up.

Something like microsoldering could teach you those skills, but if it took you 6 months to get good at it instead of 4 years, you'd have 3.5 more years at your new baseline of fine motor skills to train fencing without also impairing your academics. Doing it later for fun over an arbitrarily long time might be neat, but irrelevant, especially if you have no specific project to work on.

I noticed for a lot of people it is excuse for their laziness or actually lack of interest in the topic.

As a dev I had troves of people "wanting" to learn how to program. Usually after I give them pointers and resources they fizzle out after a week or two.

It is easier to say "I don't have talent for that" than "I have better things to do, like binge watching new series". Don't get me wrong, I am "want to learn more math"/"want to learn more electronics" person but never get to really spend time on it and no time to use all the RaspberryPis eating dust in my drawers.

In the end I believe there is talent but that is something like being Linus Torvalds or Michael Jordan, you don't need talent to play basketball or develop software, but to do that on highest levels there is something definitely.