Being “gifted” at ten means nothing at twenty if you stopped working at eleven.

Early ability is a head start and nothing more than that. It gets you praised for things that came easily, which teaches a misleading lesson about how results are produced, and then everybody else catches up through plain work. The label can actively get in the way, because effort starts to feel like evidence you were never that talented. An advantage expires unless it gets used.

Take whatever you were once called good at and put an hour of genuine, difficult practice into it this week. Not a performance of it. Expect it to feel worse than you remember.