Yes, on that I agree. I suppose I was more disagreeing on the choice of word than on the concept of something being already there in some and lacking in others. The dictionary definitions (referring to Dictionary.com and my old pocket dict) of "innate" all seem utterly inappropriate for this usage.

However, I'll still nitpick on the point of conscious effort. My "definition" of inner talent is that of an abstract representation of the "source" of the talent in question. An "outer" talent is one where, to explain by example, a person's genetic profile is directly favorable to athletics by producing the required muscle mass more efficiently with less prodding, and recovering from exercising damage more easily, and so on. By contrast, an "inner" talent is one where synergies, "affinities" in the system, side-routes, or other indirect or invisible. I always fail to find the words to explain complex dynamics where various seemingly-unrelated things converge to the same location to push in the same direction, but that's about the kind of psychological or physical events I'm trying to refer to with "inner" talents.

Some person will have no particular skill or strength that is directly beneficial towards chopping wood, but once they try, suddenly a bunch of unrelated past experiences or other points about their current self help them catch on quickly to just the right way of holding the axe and establishing their footing and swinging and so on.

What I want to make a point for is that both the processes of awakening an inner talent or slowly going through all the steps from nothing can be either conscious or unconscious. This will depend on many factors that may not be obvious.

I fail to see how it is untestable. It might be impractical to test, but if the survival of all humans suddenly depended on their future programming skills (e.g. because a dictatorial alien appears and decides to kill off any human they can't use in their programming slave workshops), it would certainly be tested, as far as I can tell.

I also didn't really define my usage of the word "effort" very clearly or unambiguously, which is intentional: I'm not in the best position to determine/figure out the exact line at which the scope of the term "effort" should be drawn for the statement to be solid.

The alternative, however, being that a person simply cannot learn and obtain talents, would imply that some individuals have a meta-talent for obtaining talents, as it's been demonstrated before that people can (and often will in extreme situations or environments) adjust in such a manner. This, to me, seems much more complex than "Everything can be learned, including talents and how to obtain talents", so by Occam's Razor I prefer to believe the former.

Yes, I attempted to infer this when saying that it requires "much more effort". First, they need to make an effort to be more aware of themselves, then to be able to learn and develop new mental models of their own accord on things of their choosing, in a conscious manner.

Then, they need to, as you say, find out what to learn. This can be achieved through the effort of looking for resources (including "human resources") that can help you figure it out or give you the right information.

Notice that at every step, there is effort required. You might call it a "meta-effort", in a sense, since you also need to make the effort of doing effort, but I like to simplify and just say that it's a lot of effort that most people aren't willing to make. After all, I'm usually explaining this to the very people who aren't, in an ultimate play to get them to either start gearing up for a long trek into Better-Person-Hood or give up about becoming a programmer/researcher/etc.