 hit Curley! Curley take care of Master's money! Nooo!"), Master says, (I paraphrase here): "Why you... you knucklehead!" and presumably squeezes his head in a vise and hands that talent over to Larry, who goes on and smugly invests that too.
The standard Christian interpretation of that parable for millennia has been that it is not about how to evaluate your broker, nor Jesus's attempt to get across the idea of opportunity cost centuries before the Austrian school of economics. It is rather a metaphor for the abilities which the Christians assert God gave us for a reason, or which secular folk would tell you persisted in the population because they were useful. People who put their abilities to work become more able; people who huddle protectively around their abilities are subject to that general rule expressed by "use it or lose it."
And Western culture found this idea so well expressed by the parable that talent became a catachresis, which is usually described as a metaphor that is used so commonly that it becomes the main or only name for the thing it describes (like the arm of a chair, or the mouth of a river). In those semiotic-replication terms I'm fond of, the original sign (representamen=the word talantou, object=other expressions for large quantities of real money, interpretant=innate ability) collapsed over time in the vocabularies of most people into something more like representamen=the word talent, object=abilities specifically which are partly innate but require development or use, interpretant=an innate quality of always being right or deserving reward.
And innately deserving a reward, rather than training for it, seems to be culturally speaking the way to go these days. You might consider that Cinderella used to be a disciplined, effective, and uncomplaining fireplace-scrubber (presumably with a lot of natural talent and patience and kindness, honed by all that time in those cinders) who therefore knew how to be nice and genuine with a prince (ever wonder what they talked about? my guess is he was one of those princes like the ones from Saudi Arabia or the UAE who come to a democratic republic to get chemical engineering degrees, and the two of them babbled on about creosote-detergent reactions while nobody else got to dance with her), whereas her stepsisters were presumably gold-digging ditzy-about-fashion-and-clueless-about-everything-else party-chick uptown skanks. But not any more; now poor old Cinderella is the marketing showpiece for the four-year-old ball gown industry, and her rags are stuffed into the closet (along with any little boys who like the gown better than that lame military-school band uniform the prince wears) Today's Cinderella wouldn't know how to get burned-on barbecue sauce off a grate if her life depended on it, and unlike her mythological predecessor's, her life never would.
Recently I've begun to work in an innovative school for at-risk gifted and talented students (that is, people***** with unusual abilities who for various reasons are apt to do badly both in regular school and in the traditional G&T programs). My particular job is implementing a high school program to help them move out into college and the real world, so the mission is, effectively, strengthening the rescued person without suppressing the rescued talent. It's one of the most interesting problems I've ever encountered.
One of my very smart bosses pointed out that you rarely hear of "gifted adults," though obviously talented people don't suddenly become "regular" when they leave school, and that one of our socialization problems is in helping students find a way to explain who they are without the affectation, humble-bragging, arrogance, condescension, apology, or even shame that can all be big problems for gifted people and everyone around them.
One of many sources of that problem is that most people don't have a very good model of what a gift is and isn't. There's often an expectation that if the person were really gifted they'd just know everything, right then, about any subject, not unlike a certain stepchild of mine (hey, your mom would love a phone call!) who at age 11 decided that everyone else in the family was comparatively a bit dim because they couldn't answer questions about dinosaurs. Gary Larson zeroed in on the belief that giftedness should imply better functioning in all dimensions simultaneously with that "Midvale School for the Gifted" Far Side.
The idea that giftedness means achieving things without effort, or that the gift comes wrapped with a side order of never being wrong, poisons all sorts of relationships and expectations and sidetracks both the people who manage the gifted and the gifted themselves. Especially, if talent does not excuse its holder from needing training, support, mistake-space, second-thoughts, and practice, and doesn't give a free pass from the humiliation of doing something awkward, boorish, or unmindful in front of others, well, then, what the hell good is it after all? That outlook implies a promise by the gifted that no one could possibly keep; they can't even keep it to themselves, because the person who expected effortless perfection and was disappointed is themselves more often than anyone else.
The talent/effort/achievement tangle is hard to unravel, and many people are just as glad not to have to try, even in simpler and less threatening areas than abstract braininess. For the most part, ordinary people are only marginally comfortable with knowing that people with astonishing physical abilities then have to develop them. They tolerate stories of Paderewski's obsessive hours of daily scale-playing, Larry Bird's 500 free throws every morning, Bruce Lee's four hours of katas six days a week, Ben Vereen walking his whole part every evening before every performance, or Picasso's daily hour of realistic drawing just to warm up, because they've absorbed idea that even great muscles and nerves have to be trained and maintained. But that brain-o stuff is supposed to just be there innately, without effort. After that radioactive spider bites him******, we accept that Peter Parker has to spend months learning to use his literally super-human balance, reaction time, strength, speed, and endurance before they do him any good (though we tend to like to imagine he does it in a week or two). But in the versions like the original comic where his web shooters are his inventions rather than glands, we accept that a high school honors chemistry student just knows how to assemble devices and make chemical compounds that would take many thousands of Ph.D-hours at a Westinghouse or Dupont laboratory, and does it in an afternoon, give or take.
Now, none of this is news to the gifted, to their friends and relatives, or to the people who teach them and work with them. University VPAAs, deans, and provosts, or the managers of R&D departments at tech companies, could give you countless examples of the kinds of difficulties I'm musing about, because they manage large numbers of gifted people and they don't survive long if they don't get it figured out.
But I think there's one other way we screw up the gifted that, because it mainly happens to teens and adults, might be less attended to, and could probably be usefully addressed. (I'm thinking about my job out loud here, I guess. That must be why I started writing this. As I often say to students, writing is an excellent way to find out what you think).
I think that I've known a significant number of people who were constantly playing the role of "genius" (or "gifted" or "talent" or "freaking astonishing polymath" or however you prefer to label it), including playing the infallible-knows-everything, I-am-a-real-life-Encyclopedia-Brown role. The paradox under that whole thing is that although what they're trying to pretend they are does not and cannot exist, it takes enormous energy and considerable intelligence to play the role, and a large part of that energy and talent then disappears uselessly into it, profiting neither the possessors nor the people around them. Furthermore, because playing the role of talented substitutes for, and to some extent precludes using and developing the talent, the bright kid who plays into the cultural role ends up as a less bright and capable adult than s/he should have been.
Naturally, you'll believe I'm thinking of all the Manic Pixie Dream Girls out there who identify themselves as the sum of their affectations. It will seem that I'm thinking about all the Wonderful Fun Loving Eccentric Slobby Geniuses, and the various flavors of Strange and Wonderful People, who one way or another have found an act to sidetrack themselves into ostentatiously odd behavior so that their always-rightness and know-everythingness isn't challenged.
But they aren't really the ones that worry me. The self-proclaimed self-conscious geeks are, relatively speaking, the healthy ones; they've at least found a decent corner to hide in and usually they are not hurting anyone else. They may be sad, lonely, or frustrated, and eternally feel like they could be doing more and enjoying more, but they do have their pleasures and their friends and they often contribute quite a bit to our society's progress and welfare. That genuinely clever Java coder might not read Mandarin as fluently as he pretends to his friends at work, and maybe doesn't actually grasp topological ideas as thoroughly as he tells the cute engineering student at the bar, so he may be isolated and missing out more than he needs to be, but he's not actively