[jacobolus]

> truly have innate talent/ability in at least one area

How are you assessing that?

In the Picasso example it seems you are confusing "practiced extensively since early childhood with extraordinary external support and training and unusual personal motivation" with "innately talented" (whatever the latter is even supposed to mean). I would imagine that some of the people you know have some similar (probably less extreme) background.

[nerdponx]

Of course. My experience is that children generally take to activities they find easy, and avoid activities they find difficult.

[jacobolus]

What kids find easy or hard has substantially to do with past experience.

Watching my 2 small kids learn and grow, they can over the course of a few months go from not wanting to try something at all because it seems impossible or scary to performing competently, with the only thing in the middle being occasional short attempts (like 10 minutes at a time), spaced weeks apart. Then once they feel basic competence, they can continue to improve very rapidly, while having a better and better time.

Just before the pandemic we had gathered 4 3-year-olds together. Kid A was embarrassed at being a beginner riding a balance bike and refused to even try because kid B was already skilled at it (kid A is now also a pro 1 year later), neither of kids A and B wanted to try going across the monkey bars while kid C had no problem (because his dad had been encouraging him with candy placed further and further away along the monkey bars for a few months), kid C who didn't do much daily running compared to the others felt bad that he was much slower at running.

And the same can be seen for drawing, throwing a ball, reading, playing a musical instrument, speaking a second language, solving simple logic puzzles, building with construction toys ....

At this level, none of these differences are primarily due to "innate talent". There are multiple orders of magnitude difference in skill to gain in a very short time, with fast returns to small amount of spaced practice.