Chapter Seven
The Traces of Talent
How can you identify your own talents? First, monitor your spontaneous, top-of-mind reactions to the situations you encounter. These top-of-mind reactions provide the best trace of your talents. They reveal the location of strong mental connections.
Kathie P., a senior manager for a computer software company, gave us a dramatic example. She was bound for her company’s annual sales meeting in the Dominican Republic. Squeezing into her tiny seat she glanced around her to see who was sharing the puddle jumper. Spread out in the back row was Brad, the aggressive, opinionated, and impatient CEO. In front of him was Amy, a genius at the details of software design, the best in the company. Across from her was Martin, a gregarious, charming Brit who through his network of contacts had single-handedly turned around their flagging European operations. And then there was Gerry, the insipid head of marketing who as usual had angled his way into the seat next to Brad.
“The problems began right after takeoff,” Kathie recalled. “We had just cleared the clouds when the alarm went off. I didn’t even know planes had alarms, but suddenly it started braying like a donkey—eee-aww, eee-aww—filling the cabin with this terrible sound. The main lights went out, and the emergency lights started flashing red. As I felt the plane drop what seemed like a thousand feet in a second or two, I looked through the open cabin door and saw both pilots, necks flushed and stiff, turn to each other. I sensed immediately that neither of them had any idea what was going on.
“There was a moment of silence in the cabin—shock, I imagine—and then suddenly everyone started talking at once. Amy craned over and said, ‘Kathie, can you see the dials? Can you see the dials?’ Martin pulled out a tiny bottle of Smirnoff from his bag and jokingly cried out, ‘At least give me one last drink!’ Gerry started rocking back and forth, moaning, ‘We are all going to die. We are all going to die.’ Brad was immediately at the cockpit door. I still don’t know how he squeezed out of those backseats, but there he was, screaming at the top of his lungs, ‘What the hell do you think you guys are doing up here?’
“Me? What was I doing?” Kathie said. “Watching, I suppose, as always. The funny thing was, nothing was wrong with the plane at all. A faulty system had triggered the alarm, and then the pilots had just panicked and pushed the plane into a sharp descent.”
Each of these reactions under extreme stress revealed dominant talents and to some extent helped explain each person’s performance on the job. Kathie’s keen observations of human nature undoubtedly contributed to her success as a manager. Amy’s instinctive need for precision was the foundation for her genius at software design. Martin’s ability to find the humor in every situation had presumably endeared him to his growing network of European clients. Brad’s compulsion to take charge was the foundation for his leadership. Even Gerry’s wailing was confirmation of his suspect backbone (this one is not a true talent since it is hard to see where and how it could be applied productively).
While this is a dramatic example of how people reveal themselves under stress, daily life offers thousands of less intense situations that also provoke revealing reactions.
Think of a recent party where you didn’t know most of the guests. Who did you spend the majority of your time with, those you knew or those you didn’t? If you were drawn to the strangers, you may be a natural extrovert, and your behavior may well reflect the theme that we call woo, defined as an innate need to win others over. Conversely, if you actively sought out your closest friends and hung out with them all evening, resenting the intrusions of strangers, this is a good sign that relator—a natural desire to deepen existing relationships—is one of your leading themes.
Recall the last time that one of your employees told you he could not come to work because his child was sick. What was your first thought? If you immediately focused on the ill child, asking what was wrong and who was going to take care of her, this may be a clue that empathy is one of your strongest themes of talent. But if your mind instinctively jumped to the question of who would fill in for the missing employee, the theme arranger—the ability to juggle many variables at once—is probably a dominant talent.
Or how about the last time you had to make a decision when you did not have all the facts? If you relished the uncertainty, sure in your belief that any movement, even in the wrong direction, would lead to a clearer perspective, you are probably blessed with the theme activator, defined as a bias for action in the face of ambiguity. If you stopped short, delaying action until more facts became available, a strong analytical theme may well be the explanation. Each of these top-of-mind reactions implies distinct patterns of behavior and therefore offers clues to your talents.
While your spontaneous reactions provide the clearest trace of your talents, here are three more clues to keep in mind: yearnings, rapid learning, and satisfactions.
Yearnings reveal the presence of a talent, particularly when they are felt early in life. At ten years of age, the actors Matt Damon and Ben Affleck, already close friends, would find a quiet spot in the school cafeteria and hold meetings to discuss their latest acting “projects.” At thirteen, Picasso was already enrolled in adult art school. At age five, the architect Frank Gehry made intricate models on the living room floor with wood scraps from his father’s hardware store. And Mozart had written his first symphony by the time he turned twelve.
These are the eye-catching examples but the same holds true for each of us. Perhaps because of your genes or your early experiences, as a child you found yourself drawn to some activities and repelled by others. While your brother was chasing his friends around the backyard, you settled down to tinker with the sprinkler head, pulling it apart so that you could figure out how it worked. Your analytical mind was already making its presence known.
When your mother, as a surprise on your seventh birthday, took you to McDonald’s instead of having a party at home as you had planned together, you burst into tears. Even at this tender age your disciplined mind resented surprises in your routine.
These childhood passions are caused by the various synaptic connections in your brain. The weaker connections manage little pull, and when well-intentioned mothers (or other terrible circumstances) force you down a particular path, it feels strange and makes you cry. By contrast, your strongest connections are irresistible. They exert a magnetic influence, drawing you back time and again. You feel their pull, and so you yearn.
Needless to say, social or financial pressures sometimes drown out these yearnings and prevent you from acting on them. The Booker Prize–winning novelist Penelope Fitzgerald, burdened by the demands of providing for her family without the help of her alcoholic husband, wasn’t able to honor her urge to write until well into her fifties. Once released by their permanent separation, this urge proved as irresistible as a teenager’s. Over the last twenty years of her life she published twelve novels, and before her recent death at eighty, she was widely considered at the top of her game, “the best of all British novelists,” according to one of her peers.
Anna Mary Robertson Moses probably holds the record for stymieing a powerful talent. Born on a farm in upstate New York, she began sketching as a young child and was so intent on incorporating every nuance of her surroundings that she mixed the juice of berries and grapes to bring color to her drawings. But her ardent sketching was soon pushed aside by the demands of the farming life, and for sixty years she didn’t paint at all. Finally, at the age of seventy-eight, she retired from farming, allowed herself the luxury of letting her talent loose, and, like Penelope Fitzgerald, was quickly borne aloft by its pent-up energy. By the time of her death twenty-three years later she had painted thousands of scenes remembered from her childhood, exhibited her pictures in fifteen one-woman shows, and became known around the world as the artist Grandma Moses.
Your yearnings may not prove quite as inexorable as those of Grandma Moses, but they will exert a consistent pull. They have to. Your yearnings reflect the physical reality that some of your mental connections are simply stronger than others. So no matter how repressive the external influences prove to be, these stronger connections will keep calling out to you, demanding to be heard. If you want to discover your talents, you should pay them heed.
Of course, you can occasionally be derailed by what one might call a “misyearning,” such as yearning to be in public relations because of the imagined glamour of cocktail parties and receptions or aspiring to be a manager because of a need to control. (Obviously, the best way to diagnose a misyearning is to interview an incumbent in the role and learn what the day-to-day realities of the role are really like once the blush has left the rose.) These false signals aside, your yearnings are worth following as you strive to build your strengths.
Rapid learning offers another trace of talent. Sometimes a talent doesn’t signal itself through yearning. For a myriad of reasons, although the talent exists within you, you don’t hear its call. Instead, comparatively late in life, something sparks the talent, and it is the speed at which you learn a new skill that provides the telltale clue to the talent’s presence and power.
Unlike Picasso, his precocious contemporary, Henri Matisse didn’t feel any yearning toward painting. In fact, by the time he was twenty-one he had never even picked up a brush. He was a lawyer’s clerk, and most of the time a sick and depressed lawyer’s clerk. One afternoon while he was recuperating in bed after another bout of flu, his mother, in search of something—anything—to lighten his spirit, put a box of paints in his hands. Almost instantly both the direction and the trajectory of his life changed. He felt a surge of energy as though released from a dark prison and seeing the light for the first time. Feverishly studying a “how-to-paint” manual, Matisse filled his days with painting and drawing. Four years later, with no schooling but his own, he was accepted into the most prestigious art school in Paris and was studying under the master Gustave Moreau.
Frederick Law Olmsted needed a similar situation to spark his talent, but as with Matisse, once revealed, his talent launched him to levels of excellence in his field at an unprecedented pace. Olmsted, a restless man with little to show for his thirty years, discovered his life’s calling (what today we call landscape architecture) when he visited England in 1850. There he was struck by, in his words, the “hedges, the English hedges, hawthorn hedges, all in blossom and the mild sun beaming through the watery atmosphere.” A few years later, after returning to the United States and refining his ideas, he won the most extensive landscape design competition ever held: New York’s Central Park. It was his first commission.
You may have had a similar experience. You start to learn a new skill—in the context of a new job, a new challenge, or a new environment—and immediately your brain seems to light up as if a whole bank of switches were suddenly flicked to “on.” The steps of this skill fly down the newly opened connections at such speed that very soon the steps disappear. Your movements lose the distinctive jerkiness of the novice and instead assume the grace of the virtuoso. You leave your classmates behind. You read ahead and try things out before the curriculum says you should. You even become unpopular with your trainer as you challenge him with new questions and insights. But you don’t really care because this new skill has come to you so naturally that you can’t wait to put it into practice.
Of course, not everyone has experienced eureka moments that determined the direction of their lifelong career, but whether the skill is selling, presenting, architectural drafting, giving developmental feedback to an employee, preparing legal briefs, writing business plans, cleaning hotel rooms, editing newspaper articles, or booking guests on a morning TV show, if you learned it rapidly, you should look deeper. You will be able to identify the talent or talents that made that possible.
Satisfactions provide the last clue to talent. Your strongest synaptic connections are designed so that when you use them, it feels good. Thus, obviously, if it feels good when you perform an activity, chances are that you are using a talent.
This seems almost too simple, much like the advice that “if it feels good, do it.” Clearly, it is not that simple. For various reasons—most of them having to do with our psychological history—nature has conspired to encourage a few of our more antisocial impulses. For example, have you ever caught yourself feeling good when someone else stumbles? Have you ever felt an impulse to put someone else down in public or even to shirk responsibility and blame someone else for your failings? Many people do, no matter how ignoble it seems. Each of these behaviors involves building one’s good feelings on the back of someone else’s bad feelings. These are not productive behaviors and should be avoided. Those tempted to use their talents to delight in other people’s failure should perhaps reexamine their values.
You are better served by tuning your antenna toward identifying those positive activities that seem to bring you psychological strength and satisfaction. When we interviewed the excellent performers in our study, what was most striking was the sheer range of activities or outcomes that made people happy. Initially, when we asked people what aspect of their work they enjoyed the most, we heard a common refrain: Almost all of them liked their job when they met a challenge and then overcame it. However, when we probed a little deeper, the diversity—what they actually meant by “challenge”—emerged.
Some people derived satisfaction from seeing another person achieve the kind of infinitesimal improvement most of us would miss. Some loved bringing order to chaos. Some people reveled in playing the host at a major event. Some delighted in cleanliness, smiling to themselves as they vacuumed themselves out of a room. Some people were idea lovers. Some mistrusted ideas and instead thrilled to the analytical challenge of finding the “truth.” Some people needed to match their own standards. Some, whether or not they had met their own standards, felt empty if they hadn’t also outperformed their peers. For some people only learning was genuinely meaningful. For some people only helping others provided meaning. Some even got a kick out of rejection—apparently because it offered the chance to show just how persuasive they could be.
This list could legitimately become as long as the roll call of the entire human race. We are all woven so uniquely that each of us experiences slightly different satisfactions. What we are suggesting here is that you pay close attention to the situations that seem to bring you satisfaction. If you can identify them, you are well on your way to pinpointing your talents.
How can you identify your sources of satisfaction? Well, we need to tread carefully here. Telling someone how to know if she is genuinely enjoying something can be as vacuous as telling her how to know if she is in love. On some level, the only sage advice is “You either feel it or you don’t.”
We will take a risk however, and offer you this tip: When you are performing a particular activity, try to isolate the tense you are thinking in. If all you are thinking about is the present—“When will this be over?”—more than likely you are not using a talent. But if you find yourself thinking in the future, if you find yourself actually anticipating the activity—“When can I do this again?”—it is a pretty good sign that you are enjoying it and that one of your talents is in play.
Spontaneous reactions, yearnings, rapid learning, and satisfactions will all help you detect the traces of your talents. As you rush through your busy life, try to step back, quiet the wind whipping past your ears, and listen for these clues. They will help you zero in on your talents.
Marcus Buckingham is an author, independent consultant, and a former Global Practice Leader for the Gallup Organization’s Strength Management Practice. For more information visit www.MarcusBuckingham.com.
The late Donald O. Clifton was the past chairman of the Gallup Organization and chair of the Gallup International Research and Education Center.