Natural Ability vs. Natural Affection...

According to Malcolm Gladwell, it takes 10,000 hours of anything to become an "expert" at anything.  The study found no cases on either end.  No people who could become experts prior to spending 10,000 hours doing something, and no cases of people who put in the time and effort of 10,000 hours who did not become experts and excell in their field.

This makes me wonder about whether God gives us a natural ability to do certain things, or simply a natural affection for those things.

I write because I love to think, and I think in language.  I am not sure why I think in words, sometimes in poetry, but never, ever in images.

Jeff knows how to cut images together at certain speeds that make them intensely exciting or sad, knows how to put images and music together to create a video experience that I would never imagine.  He mentioned that the entire control room at work was full of tapes that he had to go through in order to find the right clips to make the Rockies History video.  The thought of sifting through video clips in order to find the right images to put together an entire history of an organization made me physically nauseous.

It is so foreign to me that someone could "think in images."

I mentioned this the other night and Jeff said, "I thought everyone thought that way."

And it makes me wonder how other people think.  How do you think?  In words?  Images?  Smells?  Could you think in smells?

But I think we have these natural gifts, these ways of seeing, thinking, feeling that are God-given.  We have no control over them.

But we don't naturally have skills.  We have to learn how to use those natural tools to access the world/our thoughts/responses to the world in order to become experts in whatever field God has given us to love.

What I mean is that for as long as I can remember, if something really moves me, I stop thinking normally and suddenly think in poetry.

I have a natural affection for words.  I involuntarily take what I see, hear, feel, smell, or taste and translate that  into words, but... I wasn't born knowing how to do that.  I had to learn that skill.  I had to learn the words.  I had to play with rhyming and capitalizing and not capitalizing and not rhyming, and turn this into a metaphor or use anaphora to make this idea stand out, but stop the anaphora here so that these other ideas intentionally melded into the beginning thought or...  I had to learn all of those things to become a better poet.  The poems I write now are much better than those that I wrote in 7th grade, and I had to learn how to do that.  I didn't know I was learning because "studying" doesn't sound fun, but I studied and studied and studied, when I was in middle and high school, this craft of poetry by reading it and writing it constantly.  Do I have my 10,000 hours in?  Probably not.  But I might be getting close.

The point is that I do that because I LOVE it.  It challenges me and drives me to continue to play and challenge myself.  I wouldn't do it if I didn't love it.

I wasn't born a writer.  But I was born to love to write.