30 days in November 24

Today is:

Celebrate your unique talent day

Now there’s the rub. Just what is a unique talent and even if you have talent is it unique? Look I don’t juggle, I only wish I did. I’ve always been okay at drawing, but that doesn’t make me Rembrandt. I can string a few words together, but Shakespeare or Bradbury I’m not. I can cook a little, but I’m never going to be awarded a Michelin star. I like to sing, but I will never attain a number one record. I have green fingers compared to most, but I doubt that I would win any prizes for my marrow.

I think it fair to say I have some talent in a number of areas (some might claim a Jack of all trades and master of none) it gets me by, but do I have a unique talent? Just how may people can claim that? 

Of course we are all unique, made up of our interests, skills and experience and these days you don’t seem to need much of any of them to be admired by the public. There are plenty of people in the spotlight who seem to have no talents at all but who are paid fortunes for their celebrity alone. Does having a large well-publicised bum or being married to a footballer count as a talent? Well, it seems so given the accolades that are strewn on people with no talent other than a smile and the ability to eat bugs and worms.

What about liars? Some people are very talented at lying and pulling the wool over people’s eyes. Their talent isn’t a good thing and it definitely isn’t unique, there are plenty of lying cheats around, but should they throw a party each time they get their own way from screwing somebody over?

Not all talents are good and maybe shouldn’t be celebrated. I’m sure that the Tyburn hangman was very good at tying knots and the keeper of the dungeon in the Tower of London was a very talented torturer. The brains who worked on the Manhattan project were obviously talented physicists and the terrorists who shoot passenger aircraft out of the air are very talented marksmen. Which brings me to serial killers; if your unique talent is that you are very good at murdering people and not getting caught is that really a reason for applause?

Maybe you have to be first to do something well before you can claim to have a unique talent. Of course the problem with that is that it’s only unique until somebody else starts doing it and you know how these things snowball; just look at hula-hooping and yo-yoers.

So maybe rather than celebrating our ‘not at all likely’ unique talent today we should simply be taking stock of who we are and trying to get a bit better at what we are good at.

Maybe I should try juggling.