Am I doing enough? Am I meeting my ever-elusive potential? How can I know? Why does making the most of my talent even matter? Whether lying awake at night or on the morning commute, we will likely ask these questions throughout our careers.
The yearning to find value and purpose in our lives often shows up in existential questions about why we’re here and what we should do for work. First, know you are a valuable and unique person with varied natural talents. If you ask these big questions about how to make the most of your talent in your career and life, that’s good news. It means you’re curious and engaged.
Yes, you are born with particular unique talents. From your earliest existence, you have traits that form through neural pathways in the womb. Natural tendencies, matched with your life experiences, become how you view the world and make decisions.
These patterns, over time, become our natural way, which feels easy to us, and it may evolve into what the world calls a strength or what we are naturally good at.
Gallup defines talents as “any natural recurring patterns of thought, feeling, or behavior that can be productively applied.”
To maximize your talents is to:
Identify Your Core Talents.
You may be naturally good at organizing, socially engaging, or creating systems. There are several ways to identify your core talents – those patterns of thought, feeling, or behavior to be productively applied.
- Assessments: Not all assessments are reliable, but you can find high-quality options to look deeper into yourself. High-quality assessments provide insight into how you see the world, make decisions, interact with others, and deal with stress.
- Areas of success: Where have you had success in your education or work experiences? Go deep into these experiences by doing a STAR analysis. Dig into the situation, task to be done, actions taken, and the result’s impact. Ask yourself: “What about you made it go well”? “What was the biggest challenge?” Pull out those areas of success where you were most comfortable.
- Ask for feedback from leaders, peers, mentors, and advisors: Feedback from people you work with and those who know you can be critical to highlight areas of talent you may need help understanding. We often walk through life telling ourselves stories that are not reality. Find people in your life you know will tell you the truth about what they think you do well.
Be Excellent in Your Core Talents.
When a person finishes their education and enters the workforce, focusing on being excellent at something is best. You don’t have to be perfect at everything, but you should aim to develop excellence in at least one thing. Selecting the proper work that allows a person’s talents to shine is a productive way to start a career. You can pursue mastery and excellence by developing your abilities through education, training, and experiences.
The goal for maximizing your talents is twofold. First, people must be free to make the most of themselves. It is hard to live life having to do things that are not natural. People enjoy higher productivity and confidence with much less stress if they work in ways aligned with their talents. The world has too many opportunities for people not to maximize their abilities. Plus, if you have an excellent, provable track record, you open up opportunities to jobs you’d never imagined.
The second reason to maximize your talents is that you make the world a better place. By knowing yourself well and applying your energy with purpose, your work becomes more important than the short-term benefits of money or title. Working with a larger purpose allows you to difficult things with less stress and hardship.
Spend the time to create a purpose statement that motivates you to be excellent. Your purpose statement will evolve, but start with considering why you work in the context of the people you will impact. You may choose a purpose statement directly tied to your work (i.e., feeding the world, helping patients, building businesses), or you may select a purpose statement that impacts people as a result of your work (family, community, charity).
Be good at what is necessary to fulfill your purpose, even if it isn’t natural or easy for you.
There remain things we cannot do naturally or easily. Yet, we may need to learn skills or assume traits to succeed in the work that we wish to do. Not every C.E.O. is excellent at finance. Only some doctors have great bedside manner. No job is filled solely with people who naturally excel at all aspects of the job description. But we know successful people do two things well. One, they become excellent at the talents they were born to enjoy. Secondly, they become good at what is required, but not natural, to succeed at the work at hand.
Just because something is not a natural talent or strength doesn’t mean you can’t learn. Focus on maximizing strengths in your development. Also, humble yourself and learn the skills that require extra effort. Once you have identified your talents and become excellent, your confidence should allow you to take on things that may not be natural. This improves your own life and also makes you a desirable employee. You should begin any sacrifice or difficult challenge by considering your purpose. When improving something difficult for you is in service of others, it is incredible what you will be willing to do.
The world needs all of you when you are ready.