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 »

The Washington Post did a short story on pre-employment testing.  These are typically psychological tests that some employers use to determine whether you’re a sane person and likely not to go postal.  I got a nice quote, but the article didn’t capture the nuance.  What I meant to say was that if comprehensive aptitude testing (like my Careerfinder Program) is ever used to screen out people in the job interview process, it could be a devasting blow someone to find out that they don’t have the talents for the career path they were formally educated and trained for.   For instance, imagine a hypothetical scenario of an engineering college grad named Joe:

HR Person: Sorry Joe, we can’t hire you.  You measured too low in the spatial ability test, which is the key aptitude for our entry-level engineering positions. 

Joe:  What is spatial ability, I’ve never heard of it?  Does this mean I’m not cut out for the field of engineering? 

HR Person:  That’s about right.  You’re screwed, but at least you know this early on.  Chances are, you probably won’t like being an engineer.  We can’t take the chance of you going postal on us 5 years from now because your life has turned into an empty, meaningless wasteland. 

Joe:   I’m confused.  I studied hard for this degree.  I’m 100K in debt.  Now what should I do?

HR Person:   You should have asked that question before you went to college.

If you were in Joe’s shoes, would you be glad to learn this unexpected “bad” news during the interview process of getting a job, or would you rather get the job and then learn a few years later (in the school of hard knocks) that you chose a career path that is totally wrong for you?  Either way, now or later, you’d have to face the inconvenient truth.

Part 1:  Spatial Ability - Do You Have It or Not?

Greg is a bright and likable guy who worked his way into a large, prestigious law firm.   He despised the job but made due, the money was really good.  After a decade of grinding along he started to flame out.   His interest in mergers and acquisitions and the law in general fizzled out.   Something was way off course but he couldn’t put his finger on it.  He camouflaged his mind-numbing boredom for as long as he could, but he eventually was relegated to doing undesirable grunt work assignments.  At age 39, when the economy went south last year, his firm let him go.  Greg was actually happy to get fired, he was ready to say goodbye to all those years as a JD.  

Highly accomplished by 36 with a PhD in economics, Mari was working with the best in her field and at the top of her game.  Unfortunately it was the wrong game.  She’s brilliant and excels at whatever she goes after, but she lost enthusiasm for academic research; it just wasn’t tangible enough.  She was successful and well respected by her colleagues, but she was disengaged and stressed out.   Pretending to like her job was killing her from the inside out.  She started telling her friends that something was wrong and she needed to make a change, they thought she was going nuts. 

Rosa was a respectable head and neck surgeon.  Although she was good at it, the work was too detailed and mechanical for her.  She tried a new path in medical research at the National Institute of Health (NIH), but quickly realized that she couldn’t stomach experimenting on mice.  After some soul searching she decided to specialize in plastic surgery, which meant a four year commitment to get more highly specialized medical training.  She got accepted into one of the top surgical training medical schools in the country.  Rosa has an artistic side, so she thought that plastic surgery would bring together her aesthetic eye with her medical career.  Five years later she was physically exhausted and emotionally distraught; something went terribly wrong.  At age 40 and several advanced medical degrees under belt she was ready to face the truth; she’s not cut out to be a surgeon and has serious doubts about staying in a medical career at all.  Read the rest of this entry »

What should new graduates do to stand out in the job market?

Hi new grads.  As you know, it’s a very different world and much leaner job market than it has been for the last several decades.  Companies are doing more with less people, so they are rethinking how they hire employees.  The best places to work out there want to know that you are innately “cut out for” the job, which means that your winning edge will be to show that you eat, sleep and drink the field of expertise you’re applying for. 

Whether you’re using the cover letter strategy to land a job or carefully creating and courting a network of friends in your field of choice, demonstrate that you’re a “natural” at the kind of work you want to do by giving specific examples of personal projects you’ve done to practice and build on what you’ve learned in school, or how you’ve sought out a mentor to expand or enrich your field of study. 

The key is to communicate that you’re genuinely into the kind of work you’re seeking.  Show that you are walking the walk by how you have already been “being” what you want to do.  For instance, if you want to work for a company that builds websites, do you have a portfolio of websites or blogs that you’ve have designed for friends?

How can new graduates with limited work experience break in?

Read the rest of this entry »

By the time young people hear an inspiring commencement speech it’s too late—they are already pretty far down the wrong road.  The critical decision on what to major in has set them on a course with long-term consequences that won’t be apparent until long after they’ve graduated. 

 A career choice is immensely difficult; it’s one of the biggest, most costly decisions in our lives.  Most of us screw it up and waste a lot of time and money.  The problem is, we are expected to make this hefty decision before we’re ready, and we’re usually too young to know how important it is to get it right the first time. 

 A big reason for this problem has to do with how our minds make decisions, especially when we’re young adults.  Read the rest of this entry »