Since the greatest room for each person‘s growth is in the areas of his greatest strength, you should focus your training time and money on educating him about his strengths and figuring out ways to build on these strengths rather than on remedially trying to plug his skill gaps.
Marcus Buckingham and Donald Clifton
There is a distinct difference between talents, skills, and knowledge. Here are Webster’s Dictionary definitions:
· Talent – a special natural ability.
· Skill – the ability to do something well. Expertness or dexterity in performance.
· Knowledge – familiarity, understanding or information gained by study or experience.
In their book, First, Break All the Rules, Marcus Buckingham and Curt Coffman categorize talents, skills, and knowledge as follows:
· Talent – A naturally recurring pattern of thought, feeling or behavior.
· Skill – Steps of an activity.
· Knowledge – Facts and lessons learned. Factual and experiential.
According to this definition, a talent is a thought, feeling, or behavior that occurs or recurs naturally. Some examples of talent are singers with perfect pitch, musicians who play by ear without sheet music, the speed of a sprinter, or the grace and finesse of a ballet dancer. These are all talents, although the talents that we concentrate on here are not focused on the physical as much as they are focused on the cerebral.
Just because you have a talent in a particular area doesn’t mean that you don’t have to work at this talent to fully develop. It just means that you find this area easiest to work in (and probably more enjoyable) than other areas.
A good example of raw talent is Michael Jordan. Perhaps the best athlete to ever live, Jordan’s raw talent far surpassed the developed talent of many National Basketball Association players. However, the thing that made Michael Jordan really stand out was that he recognized his strengths and worked hard to develop them – to the point that on the court, he became an almost unstoppable force. Each week, he spent many hours developing his skills in the area of his talent. He would practice shooting, dunking, passing, and dribbling for hours, even after practice when the rest of the team had left.
The key to success is to identify your talents and then build on these talents by developing skills and gaining knowledge. You can use skills and knowledge to improve in an area of strength, but skills are not talents, nor can knowledge about a subject be called a talent. Anyone can gain knowledge or acquire skills in any area, regardless of their natural talents, but no one can become talented in a particular area unless raw, undeveloped talent is already present.
There are a number of talent profile tools available in the marketplace today that can help you uncover your areas of talent, but I believe the best tool available is the Gallup Organization’s StrengthsFinder tool.
The process for discovering your overall area of strength including Values, Personality and Talents, detailed in the Strength Zone book, utilizes the Gallup Organization’s StrengthsFinder tool for the talent profile segment.