Talentless

Talent. Some of us have it while some of us don’t. Or so the old saying goes anyways. Phil Gaimon takes it a step further in his book Draft Animals, claiming that there is talent and then there is real talent. Everyone thinks they have real talent until they realize they don’t. No matter how much talent you have, eventually you’ll run out of it. The consequences of which depend greatly upon your chosen activity, naturally. Running out of talent at a Chess tournament will probably leave you with only a bruised ego. But if you run out of talent whist operating a wheeled machine, a bruised ego will be the least of your concerns.

Last year, Robert Guarini ran out of talent while driving his 2006 Ford GT Heritage Edition. A car he had just purchased for $704,000 from the Barrett-Jackson auction in Palm Beach. Yikes. The icing on the cake being that he did so while his license was suspended. The car appears to be salvageable, but I don’t have a certified automotive insurance adjuster plaque in my Zoom background. How this all happened is debated, but the police report says Guarini told police that he was "unfamiliar with how to operate a manual transmission". More money than talent, who would have seen that coming?

Personally, I ran out of talent spectacularly, on a rainy summer night in a Hellrot ’97 BMW 328is. I absolutely deserved it because I drove that car like a complete asshat. I thought I had real talent simply because I was a car fanatic that could drive a stick shift. Thankfully, I was the only person involved and I walked away. Though it’s been nearly twenty years, the telephone pole I went into, backwards, is still pointed out to me by my family anytime we drive by it. (It’s only a mile away from our shared neighborhood, so this happens a lot.)

I have exactly enough talent to know that I do not have enough talent. I can apex a turn fairly well and match revs in a car I’m familiar with, but I’m not going to set any lap records anywhere in anything. I have my motorcycle license, passed a motorcycle safety course, and know my way around a YZ125. But just sitting on a Suzuki GSXR 1000 with the engine turned off utterly terrifies me.

Now that he’s run out of talent spectacularly, I’d like to cordially invite Mr. Guarini to join me as a member of the Victims of the Dunning-Kruger Effect. Here we celebrate our lack of talent by respecting those blessed with real talent and the machines they wield with precision with the utmost respect.