2025-10-03

Talent is Alignment

September 20th, 2025 marks exactly one year since I bought Roland’s FPX-30, 88-keys full sized digital piano. Being in my 4th decade of life I never taught myself any instrument, even though I own and dabble with many.

In fact, while I’m unable to remember sounds or hear them in my head, it seems I have a rather good understanding what “sounds nice” that allows me to ad-hoc compose music.

Feel free to listen (and judge) today’s morning jam session - a daily recording that I often make for my family on a durable recorder, as part of my “legacy”.

When I share recordings with family and friends I often hear that I’m talented and people are surprised that I only play for a year. I have much worse opinion about myself, but take the compliments with gratitude.

Here I’ll share the secret with all of you. The open secret that I tell to everyone who asks: I play piano 1-3 hours per day. As of today that’s probably ~1000-1500 hours.

That explains everything right?

Diving deeper

Sure, explanation is time, but on the other side I feel like I’m seriously crippled in the music department: I cannot name the notes that I hear. I cannot humm the music that I composed and can play with eyes closed when at the piano. I have plenty of trackers, synthesizers etc., but struggle to create 2 minutes worth of music, whereas it’s not a problem to me to have 5 minutes ad-hoc composition on piano.

I’m touched heavily by evaluation so I often mistake notes when I press record button and, finally, I tend to stick to minimalism repeating same chord progression over and over.

In other words: I don’t feel I’m good not even to have “talent”, yet my audience thinks otherwise and praises my talent.

What is a talent anyway?

This made me think - what is a talent anyway?

I often been called talented in many areas. Sure, maybe I am. I don’t feel so, but I’m not going to refute based on that. Yes, I know many weird software languages, yes, I spent a lot of time doing sysadmin, software development, troubleshooting, security hardening or even modelling. It gave me somewhat comfortable life. But then I’ve met countless people who are significantly better than me. Sure, maybe their expertise isn’t that wide, but they can beat me with eyes closed on every single one. I’d half-jokingly argue that it’s hard to be worse than me at a single domain.¹

In a very short summary - talent is time spent on learning or doing something. Which means that anyone can be talented in any area. That’s it. That’s the secret. Go, and be the next Mozart, Copernicus or Tesla (don’t be Edison, that guy was a dick).

"…but Przemysław…" - I hear you saying - "…that’s bullshit! Obviously some people are more talented than the others".

Yes, I agree. Some people spent more time than others. Maybe some grasped concepts quicker due to lifestyle, surroundings or better brain wiring, but it’s still not it. You need to water the talent and talent is watered with and only with the time.

As an example - you might be a Carpenting SuperStar but if you don’t spend years of finding best materials, structures or “tricks” that nobody else knows it’s that other person who spent decades on their craft are going to beat you to the pulp²

Alignment

…and the only question is, whether you align with “that” thing. Back to piano - it’s not like someone forces me to sit in front of piano. In fact those daily hours or trainings more often are short session. I’m making myself a coffee, I play for 3 minutes. I take a break from computer, I play for 10 minutes. After finishing daily work I sit for 30 minutes, in the morning when I wait for my kid to get ready for school I play 20-30 minutes.

I do this, because I want to do this. The only thing that sets me apart from other people in similar position is that I naturally align with piano. I like the touch of it, I like the sound of it. There was never any other instrument that gave me this feeling, but piano does.

So I spend my time with it.

Engineering

That’s often the case with Software Engineers, too. Those who are “the most talented” often aren’t. They “only “align with the the software. They fiddle with it, they work on their IDEs (vim/emacs), they do side projects, break their operating systems with bleeding edge modifications. When that “average” engineer goes home, the “talented” one is still poking at it with a screwdriver.

When hiring for myself I always looked for the passion. Passion beats everything. If someone has a passion and is good communicator than it’s almost often a win. And it’s hard to fake passion.

Ask about that time when they saved production or optimized something. Or the most exciting thing ever in the career. Notice how posture of passionate people change. They smile, they reminisce with smile, their eyes wander like in a dream and they straighten right away.

I still remember my biggest introvert hire. I asked how much experience he has and he told me that not much, but he has 4 linux servers at home. I asked what he did so far with them and he started explaining. Not a lot of words. I asked why he likes doing sysadmin and he bluntly told me that he likes being alone, looking at charts and chatting on IRC (but always charts go first). Had 0 experience but I believed he didn’t joke about the charts. He was a dependable sysadmin³ for many years, I hadn’t had a single complain about him.

Talent being Alignment is great news

The good thing is, that you can actually become talented in everything. Not by working hard (that’s silly, you won’t be more aligned if you push yourself harder), but by aligning more (get aligned by getting aligned, how stupid that is, right?).

And how you do that?

A wisdom came long time ago from gym-bros:

The first rule to become a gym beast is to believe you are a gym beast.

That is: you need convince yourself that what you do is the best thing you ever do. You hype about it. Afteer doing something related you smile into the mirror. You endlessly praise topic to your family and friends.

You won’t notice the change - it will happen slice by slice. But one day you won’t have to do that anymore, you’ll want to do it.

That will be the moment you became a (talented) beast.