Conscious Career – Day 15
To demonstrate the difference between skill and talent yet show how they are so intrinsic to each other, let’s look at a musical example. Miles Davis obviously had natural musical talent but didn’t began taking trumpet lessons until he was 13, and by age 33 his well-developed musical skills led to the release of the best-selling jazz album of all time, Kind of Blue. He had to learn how to read & write music, make arrangements, play the trumpet, etc. These were the skills he used to develop his natural talent.
Here’s one more example: you can learn the mechanics of writing (skills) – spelling, grammar and even sentence diagramming – but writing talent is more than simply being able to use the skills that most learn in primary school. It might be the innate ability to tell a story in a captivating way or to cleverly turn a simple statement into something more elegant and poetic.
Author and screenwriter, Julie Gray, once made a great observation about talent: “…while I do believe talent is inborn from day one, it does need to be identified and groomed. If Michael Phelps had grown up in a Bedouin family with no access to a swimmable body of water, perhaps his talent would never have blossomed into more than a great eye for a distant oasis.”
One more “what else” question for you to consider is what else you can do with your talent outside of your regular concept of a job. If you aren’t already using your full potential in your job, you can certainly be fully engaged in your life by using your talent wherever you can.
