Cracking the Talent Code: Part 2
Why You Don’t Know That You Have Natural Talents
Let’s pick up where we left off in part 1of this article series. To recap, spatial ability is the little known, core talent that architects and surgeons need to mentally visualize in 3 dimensions. Well educated mid-career professionals are bailing out of “successful” careers because they eventually hit a wall, they didn’t have the right innate talent to sustain their ruse. Doctors are spatial, lawyers are not, few of us know that there’s a talent gap the size of the grand canon separating these careers. Why don’t we know about our inborn talents? Spatial ability is just one of many we don’t know about, there are many more aptitudes that make us who we are. The naked truth about human intelligence—most of us don’t know squat.
Your brain is equipped with a variety of hardwired natural abilitiesthat are innate. I’m not talking about the skills you learned in school and through life experiences, that’s the software “knowledge” you added to your brain. Almost nobody makes this distinction. Thousands of my adult clients say they had no clue, so we can’t expect young professionals and students to know any better. The concept of natural talent is a well kept secret, I’ve met Harvard psychologists who didn’t realize that they were born with hard-wired abilities of any kind, let alone spatial ability. At the same time, most of us recognize that certain activities seem to come naturally. How is that I could learn guitar with minimal effort, I was playing complicated prog rock by 14 years old, but I’m a total dunce when it comes to finance and accounting? Every day life is full of anecdotal evidence that we have a certain way of thinking and doing things that have little to do with what we learned in school. We just “are” good at certain things. The sad news is that because we don’t know we have natural abilities, we don’t know how to read the obvious clues and signs happening every day of our lives.
Three mainstream career choice myths that keep us in the dark:
Myth 1: You can do anything you want. I recently tested the aptitudes of a high school senior, Dylan, who got a perfect score on the math section of the SAT test, without studying. This kid is sharp. His list of career ideas included medicine and law, as far as he was able to see, he was bright enough to do either. Which way should he go? Conventionally speaking, his intelligence appears as high. The Dylan’s of the world are typically told they can do anything they want. Fortunately for Dylan, his father was curious enough to find out what career fields his son is naturally cut out for. Read the rest of this entry »




