I also think it's not super easy to evaluate whether you have an innate talent for something. The example of Ramanujan reading math textbooks when he was twelve is definitely an exceptional case, but I also think it's not clear to a lot of twelve year olds that such deep resources in a subject even exist. I was lucky that my county's library system had a literal treasure trove of computer science related books that I could check out as a tween and teen, so I was exposed to a subject before most people were.

If your parents present you with your first computer when you're five years old, and it drops you to a bash prompt, and that's all you have, then you'll probably know considerably more than everyone else just from that being your only choice for a computing environment.

So sometimes it's hard to quantify whether or not being more successful and growing faster is about the luck of exposure. There are times when I have switched textbooks for learning something or changed my learning style and suddenly catapaulted myself to having the highest scores in classes or understanding a topic infinitely better. People said assembly was easy for them, but maybe spending a year aimlessly typing "si" into GDB was not the most effective way to learn assembly.

But having access to all these resources for exposure allows people to develop their interests and find their talents. It's just hard to say sometimes if that's innate talent and aptitude or just interest and being exposed before everyone else.

> If your parents present you with your first computer when you're five years old, and it drops you to a bash prompt, and that's all you have, then you'll probably know considerably more than everyone else just from that being your only choice for a computing environment.

Only if you have the interest and aptitude to dig in. Compare this with OP's story about trying to learn music instruments at an early age, and his brother. Like others have mentioned, it's a combination of things - you have to have the innate interest (or, if you're unlucky, really overbearing parents who force you to learn it, like Tiger Woods IIRC).

Yeah. I think it's about exposure, though. You can find your interests, talents, and such more easily if you have the luck to have the smörgåsbord of cool things in life presented to you at a young age.

> You can find your interests, talents, and such more easily if you have the luck to have the smörgåsbord of cool things in life presented to you at a young age.

That is called school, everyone goes there. Before school was mandatory and most kids didn't go there was little opportunity to discover your talents, but today most kids gets to try crafting stuff and reading about a wide range of subjects and doing a wide range of physical sports and learning basic music in school.

There might still be some undiscovered talents after all that, but most do get in contact with something that relates to their talent if they have one.

I'd contend that you can develop interest and talent but struggle to grow without extra exposure. I became interested in computers literally because of Scratch in middle school!

But I wouldn't have progressed without having a parent who was a Java programmer at some point and local libraries with deeply technical books. I had to explore out of class to find my niche and develop my interests.

That really helps, indeed

I would partially agree. Speaking from experience, I can say that if you're naturally good at something, you can learn it pretty well even if resources are of poor quality. Obviously it makes all the difference if they're good, but you get it easily in any case