Reflect on the statments below and state your position on gifts and talents. How are they different, if you believe them to be different, and how can we define the population? How many Jamaicans are in a similar position as these famous persons before their gifts were unearthed?

• Her family suggested Louisa May Alcott should find work as a servant or a seamstress. An editor told her she could never write anything with popular appeal.
• Beethoven handled the violin awkwardly and preferred playing his own compositions instead of improving his technique. His teacher called him hopeless as a composer.
• Walt Disney was fired by a newspaper editor for lack of good ideas.
• Thomas Edison's teachers said he was too stupid to learn anything.
• Einstein did not speak until he was four years old and didn't read until he was seven. His teacher described him as "mentally slow, unsociable and adrift forever in his foolish dreams." He was expelled and was refused admittance to the Zurich Polytechnic School.
• Louis Pasteur was only a mediocre pupil in undergraduate studies, 15th out of 22 in chemistry.
• Isaac Newton did poorly in grade school.