You don't like the implications of this, but is it true?
I'd never play soccer as good as Messi, even if I'd practice every day in my life for many hours. Do you think that everyone has the same innate ability to play soccer?
You can replace the example with any sport/music/whatever you like.
Do you think that intelligence is special and everybody has the same intelligence level?
Innateness here is a pretty complicated topic. Hard work at an early age probably has a huge part of molding skills we associate with so-called “intelligence”.
Was Mozart a genius? Or was he working really hard at being a musician from an early age, and thus just very skilled? Would Mozart succeed if we suddenly had to train him to be a Java programmer? Where does the narrow “skill” end and the broader “general intelligence” begin?
I would argue skill is measurable and meaningful, but “intelligence” less so
Ryo Fukui started playing the piano at 22 (accordion at 18), he did alright for himself.
Mozart’s dad was a great student and his mother’s father was highly educated too. So my guess is, he’d be able to handle Java.
It’s actually easy (in principle) to measure the programming facet of intelligence: CS programs do this with weed-out classes.
Using Mozart & co. as [counter]examples in a discussion about innate potential/intelligence/development is about as useful as using lottery winners to derive recommended savings levels for the general population, or using lightning strike victims to derive recommendations for public safety.
I don't think there's any problem measuring intelligence, where we've traditionally run into issues is where we start to make policy or social decisions using this data without understanding it's subtleties.
I think Jordan B Peterson has a good classroom video segment[1] on this problem.
Just talk to your kids, teach them what you can, explain the things that you can't teach, and tell them the truth about the things you can't explain (i.e. that you can't explain them)