Gotta call bullshit on this.
I can practise ad infinitum. And have the best instruction. I will never play in the NHL. No "gift".
Nor will I ever be a virtuoso on guitar. I have worked at some complex pieces for decades and have never mastered them. No "gift".
Song-writing has been limited only by the amount of time I have been able to put in. But, I feel no limitations there. Its my "gift", and has been the envy of guys who make me look dumb on guitar. They will NEVER be able to do it. No "gift".
Also with welding. I got good. Took a long time. But there were guys in the same classroom who were better than I EVER got in their first week! No exaggeration.
My two cents. No offense mhammer, I always enjoy your input, bro!
Expertise does not come from genes, outer space, or time alone. What creates the belief in "giftedness"? Typically, it results from not witnessing the on-line and offline practice of someone (for instance, infant speech can seem to come from out of nowhere, but they spend hundreds and hundreds of hours practicing sounds before weget up). It also results from the exasperation that people feel when they know they have put in the time and yet it seems to come so effortlessly to others. But that exasperation - justified as it may be - is not any sort of explanation. If you and your friends each separately purchase lottery tickets every draw, and someone else wins before you do, it's luck, not special skill or a gift. Some of us can get lucky and the right experiences fall into place at the right time, allowing us to
extract more from our practice. Some of us are luckier still and have decent coaches. The rest of us stumble along, trying, bt the experiential stars don't align for us.
It is a natural occurence in human learning that we tend to learn stuff in pockets or silos, and fail to connect stuff that is related if it was acquired in a different context. With time, the independent tidbits of our knowledge can become connected, permitting higher-order more abstract thinking about the subject matter. One of the nicest illustrations of this was a paper we read in grad school about children's mathematical reasoning. There will be exceptions, but your average 7 year-old is unlikely to realize that money operates by the same rules as classrom arithmetic; that two dimes and nickel works identically to 10+10+5 or (2x10)+5, because they were learned in different circumstances. Examination of experts, and the growth of expertise, is that their knowledge in those areas where they have expertise is very well interconnected. They often have instant analogies for anything and everything in their area of expertise. Expertise is generally always domain-specific, not generalizable to new domains previously unexperienced; although "domain" limits can vary, such as a person who plays piano being able to pick up guitar with some ease.
For something like guitar, what distinguishes the folks who blow us away is their capacity to deploy complex strategies on the fly. I listen to a guy like Guthrie Govan, and his improvisational abilities astound me. He knows what-to-do-next at the same speed as your favourite NHL, NBA, or NFL/CFL player knows how to catch and use a rebound or "see a hole" in well under 200msec. The speed with which experts can determine what course of action is feasible at this precise moment comes from their practice and the manner in which the knowledge they have gained over that practice has become well-integrated.
The classic research on expert/novice distinctions was carried out with chess experts. They were studied largely because there are international rankings of chess players that allow the researcher to compare , say, the top 5% against a group ranked 30 percentile points below that, versus complete novices. No different than studying groups of people taking identifiably different daily dosages of a given medication. One of the things that came out in the research was that expertise allows one to do
less work, by permitting the expert to completely ignore what they recognize as irrelevent. Case in point. Experts and novices were briefly shown a photo of a chess board with pieces spread around, and then asked to recall what was on the board, and where, some time later. Experts had near-perfect recall, and novices were spotty. The same persons showed absolutely NO difference in recall of things like word-lists. But more telling was the finding that expert-novice differences in chess-board recall were for images of
games-in-progress, and
not for randomly-distributed pieces. If it was a game in progress, the novice had to memorize it as the black horsey thing was over here, the white castle thing over there, the salt-shaker thing over there, etc. The expert looked at the board and thought "Ah, the 1956 Hungadunga opening gambit!", and that was it. Their well-organized background knowledge allowed them to be more effective because they had
less work to do. When the board was simply random placement, and they could not apply that knowledge, they had just as much work to do as novices, and their performance fell to similar levels as novices.
So let's take this to the guitar context. you've worked your way up to a particular note - let's say a high G on your E-string. What comes next? Well, what
could come next? What prepared strategies do you have under your belt? Which of those best complement where you were headed, your current tone setting, where you want to end up, and so on? Is there anything in your riff tool-belt that you can use to provide a surprise element, or that can expediciously take you from where you are to somewhere that will provide that element of surprise? Will it complement where you have your fingers, or the speed with which you can move them from where they are now? A lot of micro-decisions to be made in a short period of time. Will any of that be instantly accessible if one has simply been playing the same runs for decades? Not likely. What will do so is practice that explores branching-off points and provides strategic alternatives, that can be assessed/ranked for their applicability to any subsequent choices one is going to make. And so on.
I never really liked what I had heard of Ten Years After player Alvin Lee. Not all that crazy about George Thorogood, either. Both of them always struck me as very repetitive. I mean, they had some decent classic riffs, but always struck me as being in a rut that never extended beyond those riffs. Admittedly, that bias on my part may be due to the limited playlist found on radio stations. It's possible that both have a broader repertoire; I just never got to hear it. Assuming what I'm familiar with is representative, THAT's what happens when one engages in lots of practice without extending beyond and interconnecting new and old ideas and strategies. HIghly practiced is part of, but not the same as, expertise.