A talent is not the same as a skill. A skill can be learned and acquired by any person of reasonable intelligence, while a talent is quite unique to each person.
Read Tom Rath’s Strengths Finder 2.0 to discover what your 5 top talents are. It’s a little book that won’t take more than 2 hours of your time, but it will CHANGE your life!
I define a talent as “a superior ability to use things, ideas or people to produce a paid result.”
You know you have a talent when it fulfills the following four criteria, mentioned by Marcus Buckingham in his book Now, Go Find Your Strengths: (Note: the acronym S.I.G.N. will enable you to easily memorize those four criteria)
SUCCESS: You’ve done it before and have had success doing it.
INSTINCT: You feel naturally inclined to do it. For example, when you have nothing to do, you naturally think about using your talent to do something.
GROWTH: You feel your mind is growing in complexity as you use your talent, because you are able to create more and more distinctions which enable you to make better and better decisions based on increasingly superior evaluations.
NEED: You may feel physically tired after exercising your talent, but psychically, you feel satisfied. In other words, you have a definite psychic need to exercise your talent.
