Lots of upvotes, but that’s simply not true. It is true that people can be gifted in one area and not in others, but those people can excel in those areas more than someone even more passionately interested could ever hope to.
I knew a guy named Joe Rohde. You can look him up, he ended up being a head of imagineering at Disney. When I knew him, he was a high school art teacher, and then just starting at Disney. His aptitude for art was off the charts, and his mom said that was true when he was four and able to draw 3D renderings when his peers couldn’t do stick figures. Sure, he practiced and developed skills, but his ability to hold a 3D image in his mind, tweak and rotate it, and then put it on paper, is something innate. He was absolute crap at math.
I spent 40 years at a company that mostly made rocket engines for NASA and the DoD, working with literal rocket scientists. I met all sorts of very smart people. Some were the stereotypical scientist that were geniuses in a particular area but had no skills outside of it, but others were just simply brilliant at anything they turned their mind to. Many of them defied the stereotype and also has great social skills.
It might be nice to think that anyone can be truly great at anything they put their mind to, but I’ve seen too many people who are truly great at things to believe it. Some people are just wired differently.
Uebercomplicated@lemmy.ml 6 days ago
This is coincidentally a symptom of dyslexia, so you are right to think of it as something innate, unfortunately. It’s also why so many architects are dyslexic.
AFKBRBChocolate@lemmy.ca 6 days ago
He was trying to explain how it is one time, and he showed me by drawing a picture of a galloping horse, but he didn’t sketch it out and then fill in the detail. He started at the nose and did it in full detail, left to right, like he was uncovering the drawing by lifting a sheet. It was really amazing.