Perhaps Talent Is Something Someone Else Has to Discover

The other day, I saw manga artist Masakazu Katsura on television talking about his years at Weekly Shonen Jump.

Katsura is known for manga such as Wing-Man and Video Girl Ai. They may not have been mega-hits on the scale of Dragon Ball or Slam Dunk, but maintaining long-running series in Jump during the same era still makes him more than successful enough.

What I found interesting, however, was the gap he described between what he truly wanted to draw and what people actually valued in his work.

He Wanted to Draw Superheroes

What Katsura loved was superhero stories.

His editors, however, told him to draw girls and romantic comedies. That was not what he most wanted to do.

Still, he was a professional manga artist, so he drew what his editors requested.

And it sold.

His depictions of girls were especially praised, and he became popular as a romantic comedy manga artist. His talent had been discovered in a place slightly different from the one where he had wanted to compete.

What happened next is even more interesting.

After becoming successful and gaining a stronger position as an artist, he could finally draw the superhero stories he wanted with greater freedom.

But according to him, they did not work out.

Readers preferred what his editors had told him to draw over what he had wanted to draw most.

It is a rather cruel story.

Apparently, What You Love and What You Are Good At Are Different

People often say that you should turn what you love into your career.

It is certainly painful to spend decades doing something you dislike. But there is no guarantee that what you love and what you are good at will be the same thing.

Perhaps we are surprisingly poor at recognizing our own talents.

When something comes easily to us, it does not look like much of an ability from our own perspective.

We think, “Surely anyone can do this.”

The people around us think, “No, they cannot.”

Conversely, we become deeply attached to the things we love because we have invested so much effort in them. That makes it easy to convince ourselves, “This is where I will prove myself.”

Unfortunately, the amount of effort we invest and the amount of talent we possess are not the same thing.

It may be better simply to do what comes naturally to us.

The Question Is Whose Advice to Follow

Because we are good at something, we may fail to recognize that it is a strength.

If we cannot see it ourselves, we can ask someone else.

That sounds simple.

But it creates another problem.

Whom should we ask?

In Katsura’s case, the person advising him was an editor at Jump whose job was to sell manga. That editor also saw real reader feedback every week. Being told “this is where your strength lies” by someone like that had meaning.

Asking ten colleagues, “What is my talent?” and taking a majority vote will not reveal your ideal career.

Not everyone else can see us objectively, and advice from someone with poor judgment can be even more dangerous than our own assumptions.

What we ultimately need is someone who can identify an ability we cannot see in ourselves and judge whether it has value in the wider world.

How many people like that will we meet in a lifetime?

When you think about it, luck plays a very large role.

Your Calling May Not Be the Work You Want to Do

When we think about our careers, we almost always begin by asking what we want to do.

But we can also approach the question from the opposite direction.

What do we do as a matter of course that other people somehow value? What do they repeatedly ask us to do? What strengths do people with more experience recognize in us?

Those things may contain talents we have not noticed ourselves.

Of course, this does not mean we will succeed simply by living as others tell us to.

But we should at least question the assumption that “I understand myself better than anyone else does.”

Even an artist as accomplished as Masakazu Katsura experienced a gap between what he wanted to draw and the talent the public valued.

If that is true, it would be far stranger to assume that the rest of us have a complete understanding of our own talents.

Talent may exist inside us, yet be discovered by someone else.

Seen this way, the luck we truly need in life is not merely to be born with talent.

It is the luck to meet someone who will tell us, “No, that is not it. This is where your strength lies.”