If talent and hard work are the main factors in a successful career and a creative life and it is said to take 10,000 hours to truly become proficient in any area.
I hate this saying...
This translates to working full time for 5 years in order to be proficient. It's simply not true, in the context that it is told. Everything depends on the degree of efficiency and the mechanistic difficulty of what is trying to be learnt.
The single most important factors in efficiency is your own person efficiency - aka passion. This is the amount of energy you are going to spend on something, which translates to how much you do when trying to become proficient. It's what you are going to be thinking about in the shower. It's what you are going to find people to talk about, what you are going to explore and so forth.
The reason why it is so important is because all proficiencies have a long thread of dependencies. A career doesn't take "5 years" to become proficient at, it takes your entire life. All that time your parents spent teaching you to talk? All that time in school, learning to relate to people in sports(/whatever)... even the time you spend creating posts on TypoC. Everything works it way into your proficiencies, but all of them are going to be built around what you are passionate about. There is no line that can be drawn, really. Going to school to "become something" isn't efficient - at all. There is very little difference between someone who has gone to school and someone who has learnt on the job, and the difference tends to favor those that learnt on the job, assuming equal ability (see: school as economic signal).
The only things that I can think of that would specifically take 5 years to learn, and that's assuming you have the background and the passion, would be masters/phd level mathematic specialties (and related sciences). Maybe some other disciplines, as talent fluctuates. I can't think of almost anything else, job or academic, that would require five years of dedicated learning to be proficient.
And that's simply due to the mechanistic difficulties - it's likely one of the hardest things to learn, due to the broadness and depth of the subjects, and is demanding in terms of talent. And it goes way beyond being "proficient" in the "go get a job and be good at it" sense.
How will we know where our true talents lie before putting in the hours?
Talent is only needed if you want to be on top, or at least in the top 10% of a narrow discipline. That is, top 10% of already proficient people. Normally it is a waste of time - a marginal increase. People who are there have a passion and a talent, and unfortunately not everyone is created "equally". That is, you should be doing it *for* you, not to optimize your natural abilities. Trust your talents and passions to be somewhat aligned.
The simple reality is that humans are extremely malleable. Our competency level far exceeds something like 90% of the skills we will learn. Most of us, with 10,000 hours of dedicated time (assuming basic dependencies), could learn the fundamentals of high level math, probably the single most "restrictive" topic in terms of natural talent. You can teach the worst dancers to be professionals in that time. Maybe not world champions, but certainly "proficient" enough to teach, etc. This could go on and on... 10,000 hours of dedicated time puts natural talent way down on the tier. Slightly more talent is not even close to the effectiveness of slightly more passion.
I always think of cooking as a good example of this. Most of the time, the effective time spent cooking is less than 15 minutes a day - simply because 90% of the time, it isn't "learning", but redoing the same actions. But even if we boost that up to an hour a day, every day, 10,000 hours would take ~
30 years to be competent. That can only be true if it is a serious chore, repetitive and boring. Add a slight amount of passion - as in, trying new recipes, attending a few classes - and it won't take more than 500 hours to be proficient. And likely far less (I would say for me to go from "can't cook toast" to half way proficient to be a couple hundred hours). At the professional level, maybe 2000 hours. And again, add a little passion, and that is vastly reduced... likely because you have dependencies (help your mom cook before? Spent time in a kitchen? What what happens in the kitchen when you go out to eat? watch cooking shows?)
If you ever doubt this, think of quitting your job - and then going and doing one task for the same amount of time. Every day, hour after hour, day after day, week after week, month after month,
year after year.
Are some people going to have an easier time? Yes. And quite often the people that will are either specialists, like you would be if you made it a full time job, or generalists. In the first case, you are simply behind the curve or slightly less efficient (time spent or effective time), and in the second, they have higher levels of dependencies built up.
The point is that you can do almost anything, if you chose to do it. It is extremely unlikely that there is a talent limit that will prevent you from being proficient in nearly any discipline. Proficient, that is, not "the best". It's logical that you cannot be "the best", because only one person can. What you can be is proficient, and more than most of the population, simply because no one can be proficient in everything. You aren't going to be crowded out, ever, if you have passion and time.
It's only when you are talking about competing, or some other "top winners take all", that the mixture of pure talent and dedication matters.
