The Stuff That Really Matters Most: Talents, Skills, Gifts

Talent is God's gift to you. What you do with your talent is your gift to God. -- Leo Buscalia

We're all trying to fix our weaknesses. Instead take care of your weaknesses, mitigate them, and then use and build on your strengths. Use your strengths. But how do I know I know what my strengths, talents and skills are? Make a list of everything you've ever done that:

• Is so easy that you take it for granted

• You have a hard time accepting compliments because it’s so easy

• You experience joy and satisfaction when doing it

• Everyone respects you for it naturally

• You don’t understand when others have a hard time doing it

These things are your talents, your strengths and your gifts. Run with them. Use them. Focus on them, not on your weaknesses.

Identify your talents today and use them everyday. See if that makes a huge difference in what you accomplish and how you feel about yourself and those around you.

The Stuff That Really Matters Most: Knowledge

Have you ever met a genius? 

You know, that girl who assigned herself homework over the summer break; the kid in high school who read the encyclopedia for fun; that nerd in college who read physics textbooks like they were novels; that business owner who always came up with cool new innovative products.

Let me tell you about a genius. She’s a world-class gymnast. She learned a new language and speaks the local dialect with a perfect accent. She’s an accomplished experimental scientist in both physics and chemistry. She’s a skilled mathematician with great skills in logic. She’s a powerful, influential negotiator, psychologist, and strategist.

Does this sound familiar? That describes each of you. Think about all of the things that you learned as a small child. Did you know who had the biggest bowl of ice cream or the most cookies? Did you experiment with gravity and the chemistry of food from your high chair, much to your parent’s chagrin? Did you know how to influence people to get what you wanted? Did you successfully learn to play games with complex strategies? If you think learning how to walk is easy, just talk with someone who lost that ability and is working on relearning it.

Psychologists tell us that you learned 90% of what you know before the age of six. And then we sent you to school to make sure it never happened again. And most of us never recover from this school induced coma.

We are all born geniuses, we've been de-genius-ized by school and by life. So go out and rediscover your genius today!

Lessons From the Bow Tie

Most of us live our lives the way we wear bowties.

Most people wear a clip-on bowtie. We clip on a bowtie on top of our collar. We live our life the same way. We clip on an identity, we clip on our job. We clip on our enthusiasm. We clip on our efforts. We live at a very superficial level. We coast through life, hardly experiencing it.

Some people move up to the next level, a strap-on bowtie, the kind you often wear with a tuxedo. But even here, many just wear a clip-on. With a  strap-on bowtie, you wrap the tie around your collar and connect it with a little hook. This is how some people live life. They wrap it around themselves and get a little more involved but without going to any great depth to really live life. It looks good, better than a clip-on bowtie but still it lacks something of reality and depth of enjoyment.

A few people enthusiastically experience bowties, by tying one on all by themselves. Even some of these people need others to help them tie the bow. Everyone struggles at first learning to tie the bow for themselves. Remember learning to tie your shoes? But eventually, with some effort and practice it becomes easier and easier until its second nature and can be done with no effort at all.

That's how the genius lives life. They struggle for a while to discover their genius, exploring the world around them. But they eventually encounter it, sometimes just stumbling upon it when someone questions them about what they truly love to do. Even then, they will struggle a little with it until they really begin living their true genius. Then it just becomes second nature, life opens up and soars before their eyes.

So, will you be content to clip on life, strap it on, or go for genius and tie it on enthusiastically, with joy and excitement and live to the fullest, living your true genius?