Have you ever overstayed your welcome? Overstaying your welcome happens when you visit a friend or family members home, and you stay there way past the time when you are expected to leave.
I’m pretty sure I overstayed my welcome at some of my past jobs. The writing was on the wall. I knew it was time for me to go, but I stayed because I didn’t have a clear idea of what I wanted to do next.
I thought my journey toward figuring out the next steps in my career would be easier if had some type of talent. Talented people always seemed to be successful and love their careers. My problem was that I didn’t know if I had any talents or how to find them if I did.
I was certain that I didn’t have talent in the traditional sense though. I couldn’t act, dance, sing, draw or play a sport well enough to make any significant money any time soon. So if I was going to figure out my talents and use them for my next career move, I needed to come up with something fast. I needed to figure out if I really had a talent for something.
Defining Talent
Even though we say everyone has it, we don’t do a great job of defining talent in our culture. As a result, we only think of talent as an aptitude or skill in these well-known fields like acting, painting, and athletics. Looking at talent this way makes people who aren’t proficient in these fields feel like they have no talent. It also can make them feel like they have no chance of doing something they actually enjoy with their career.
After some careful consideration, I’ve come to understand talent in a new way. So here’s my definition: talent is your natural aptitude or skill in the use of your creativity.
And what is your creativity, you ask? Well, here’s how Steve Jobs defines it.
“Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. That’s because they were able to connect experiences they’ve had and synthesize new things. And the reason they were able to do that was that they’ve had more experiences or they have thought more about their experiences than other people.”
Basically, creativity is the art of connecting the seemingly unrelated experiences of your life and using them to come up with something new. So talent, or more importantly, your talent is your natural aptitude for connecting your life experiences and synthesizing them in a way that allows you create new things.
Because everyone has different life experiences and different perspectives on those experiences that only they can connect in new ways, everyone has talent. You also never run out of talent. As long as you live, there will be new experiences for you to connect and share with the world. So you always had talent and will continue to have new talents throughout your lifetime.
Practical Applications of Talent
I know this talent concept sounds a little lofty, but it’s actually very practical.
Take this Legally Bold platform for example. Here is a list of the connected experiences that I attribute to spurring me to create this business:
- practicing law,
- drawing a frog for science class in the 3rd grade,
- meeting my first boyfriend at age 14,
- my undergraduate engineering degree,
- depression, and
- discovering a grocery delivery service in law school.
When you look at this list objectively, it seems like the random, everyday experiences in someone’s life. But I can clearly see how each came together to create this business.
I know that I had a desire to do some artistic and challenging that served attorneys because I drew that frog in 3rd grade and became a practicing attorney. I understand that I wanted my business to make women feel understood and heard because that’s how I felt meeting my boyfriend at 14.
I get that I wanted to create a business that combined the ease of technology with my desire to figure out one of life’s major problems because of my engineering background and my experience with that grocery delivery services. Finally, it was important that Legally Bold be a safe place for female professionals to express how they truly feel because of my experience with depression.
Want another example? Take lego artist Nathan Sawaya. Sawaya used to be a corporate lawyer in NYC. To relax after a long day at work, he began making sculptures with a toy from his childhood. After some encouragement from his family, Sawaya put up a website featuring his artwork. Today, Sawaya is an internationally known lego artist and speaker. Sawaya combined some of the skills from his legal career (advocacy and negotiations) with legos, a childhood toy he loved, to create a business and vocation that no one saw coming.
I bet if we had asked Sawaya before he started his lego career whether he thought he had any talent beyond the law, he probably would have said no. But then Sawaya connected the experiences of his life and found the thread that ties it all together. His talent was there all along. He just needed to pay attention to it.
So Are You Talented?
Yes, we are all talented. We have an innate aptitude for connecting the experiences of our lives in new ways. If we really look at ourselves and our experiences, we will be able to connect what no one else does and let our true talent shine. That’s how we find our next career move and that’s how we stop overstaying our welcome at jobs that no longer serve us.
What’s your talent? Are there experiences from your life that you have been thinking about using to figure out your next career move but don’t know where to start? Drop me a line in the comments below and we can figure it out together.
