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If you are a vocalist who sings off key, an actor who mumbles through your monologue or a painter who makes puddles with your paintbrush, someone at some point is bound to tell you that you have no talent. As an aspiring artist myself, I have been told that I was not good enough, creative enough or prepared enough for something-many times. When I first started out, I believed that the teachers, audience members, friends, or family that would be bold enough to tell me that I had no talent for something were "mean" or "out of line."

But as I matured as a person and an artist, I realized that being told that I had no talent for something was going to be frequent reality. It is simply a "real" fact of life that not all of us are cut out for everything. And that reality extends beyond our creative life as artists and into our everyday lives in anything that we aspire to do.

And, frankly, I think we are lucky if someone is honest enough with us to tell us we have no talent for something. A lot of people will not either because they felt as I used to feel or because they simply do not want to invest enough time in you as a person to be bothered. But if we do get told we have no talent for something, it affords a few luxuries. If we are told we have no talent for a particular job or activity, we are then released from a bad situation and freed up to find something for which we might be better suited. If we are told that we have no talent for the art that we love, we have the power to make some choices.

At first the words, "You are not good enough, you have no talent, or even worse, a dismissive "good-bye or next" are going to hurt. There is no getting around that. But the trick is to decide. How long are you going to allow it to hurt? What are you going to do about it? How much do you love the art and have the drive to improve? Or better, do you love the art or art itself enough to explore and find something for which you do have talent? If you crumble under the pressure and or allow yourself to stay down when you are kicked in the creative heart, then it is good that you found out early enough to get out of life that is based on being told "no" a lot of the time and even if you are quite good at what you do. If, however, you rise up in internal anger and feel like fighting with the foe that wants to forsake you are your gift, you might well have the strength and the stamina to make it.

But realize that "making it" also means changing your perceptions about what art

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