Why You Don’t Know That You Have Natural Talents

Let’s pick up where we left off in part 1 of 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 abilities that 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 naural talents 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.

It turned out that Dylan’s spatial ability is quite low, visualizing in 3D isn’t his strength.  His personality and temperament is imaginative, logical and big picture oriented; he’s an intuitive-thinker (NT).  Dylan’s talent mix also includes strong diagnostic and analytical problem solving abilities, and when these are combined with his non-spatial NT strengths, give him the cognitive profile for sciences like economics and law.  Medicine is down the other fork in the road of the physical and life sciences, which typically require more spatial ability to excel in. 

Dylan’s life experience supports his aptitude testing results.  One of his high school teachers calls him “The Philosopher,” a trait that is common among non-spatial NTs with high problem solving abilities.   What’s most fascinating here is that his personality and nature have been observable and obvious to those around him, including himself, but no one knew how to single out or “name” these aptitude distinctions.  We tend to generalize people’s intellectual capacity, “that guy’s a genius, he can do anything,” rather than pay attention to the specific ways they behave and think.  If you don’t know what to look for, you’ll miss even the most obvious clues.   

By the way, clinical medical fields largely engage the Spatial ST (sensor-thinker) talent mix; most doctors are practical, hands-on, spatial diagnosticians.  In other words, doctors aren’t abstract philosophical types, rather, they are concrete people like mechanics and HVAC techs who like to fix and tinker with tools and physical objects.  In many ways, they are the polar opposite of lawyers.  Dylan ruled out medicine with a smile, his mind just doesn’t work that way.  Dylan’s story of self discovery is rare.  Most students at all levels of education aren’t so lucky.  Vincent, a young lawyer discovered after graduating from law school that he was very high spatial.  Here’s his recent comment on my blog on Part 1 of this article series: 

I was completely unaware of the concept of spatial ability until my university years, when I started to become miserable studying something completely non-spatial [Law].  As I was undecided on my subject choice, I had let my parents choose law.  Halfway through, still rather unaware of what the problem was, I chose to stick with it and managed to complete it.

Now a few years post-graduation, still miserable, I’m currently looking to do what Greg did, which is to switch into patent law.  I’ve recently looked at some sample patent documents and, due to its spatial nature, this area does seem to provide me with excitement (which I haven’t had in a long time).

What’s interesting is that Vincent had strong clues in high school that he was naturally talented for physical science and spatial design, but he didn’t have a language or a way to understand “why” he was good at those subjects.  Like most of us, we chalk it up to be generally “smart” and convince ourselves that we can do anything we set our hearts on.  I estimate, conservatively, that about two thirds of college grads are in Vincent’s shoes.   Quite often, the smarter you are, the harder you fall into the wrong field. 

Myth 2: SATs say how smart you are.  As long as you do well on your SATs you have an edge in today’s world.  Colleges and companies will roll out the red carpet because they think you’re smart.  But they don’t really know if you have the “right kind” of smarts, do they?  The ongoing and nearly exclusive use of standardized achievement tests and grade point averages are the mainstay quantifiers of intelligence. Our schools and culture are stuck in the box of measuring a one-size-fits-all “general” intelligence (a.k.a. “g”).   We largely think of people as either very smart or somewhat less so along a single continuum. 

The problem is that the brain is commonly viewed as a “blank slate” all-purpose engine, and we think of smart people as having more horsepower.  People who do well on the SATs and get good grades think of themselves as bright, and they often are, but being a good student won’t tell you whether you’re cut out to be an economist or an architect.  Just because people are smart at some things doesn’t mean they’re smart at everything.  Smart is as smart does, as Forrest Gump might say. 

Actually, our brains have many different engines or aptitudes, each does a different job.  We all have some high, medium and low abilities and a variety of personality traits; it’s this combination of strengths and weaknesses that make us who we are.  Did you know that each major profession engages a different pattern of aptitudes and traits?  Excellent economists and architects are smart in very different ways; they each have a unique blend of abilities and personality traits in their mental toolkit.  See Mari’s story in part 1 to see what happens to someone who had the smarts to be an architect, but didn’t realize it until after she became an economist. 

Myth 3:  To be successful, get marketable skills.  It’s too bad that the places we go much of lives to learn and work—schools, universities and workplaces—are looking for our learned skills, rather than natural talents.  Have you ever had an employer ask you whether you’re innately cut out for a job?  At social events around twenty-somethings, I mingle to hear if anyone is talking about their innate talents; not a peep.  There are no cultural expectations, language or accepted social values to spread the natural talent meme.  Since our major institutions aren’t looking for natural talent, the concept doesn’t exist in our daily conversations.  We obsessively talk about going to the “best” college to get marketable, trendy degrees and credentials to acquire worth, status and wealth.  The reality is much less sexy than the fantasy.  Soon after people get their first professional job they realize that their skills and knowledge quickly becomes obsolete if they don’t have the natural ability and drive to keep their subject matter fresh.  That’s something you won’t learn in college.   If colleges were to tell the truth of how unfulfilled people are with their careers just a decade after graduation they’d go out of business.  I encourage young people to figure out what comes naturally and practice it because you enjoy doing it.  Eventually, you’ll not only be good at it, you’ll be highly skilled too.  

I am always impressed with the very rare person who is curious enough to find out whether they have inborn abilities.   They don’t get fooled by these myths so easily.  This is just the way it is and always was; we don’t know what we don’t know.  Not long ago, before we discovered germ theory, doctors didn’t realize how important it was to wash their hands before surgery.   Until an unconventional scientist came along to solve the mystery, patients were dying from doctor’s dirty hands.  So it goes with natural talents, if you don’t know you have them, you won’t think to look for them.  We can’t easily see how our minds are wired up.  Human intelligence research scientists are in a stalemate, the nurture and nature camps are still battling it out.  So, it’s not your fault that you don’t know what your talents are, hardly anyone does.  

Stay tuned, in part 3 of this series I’ll look at what the research scientists are finding in their search to understand human talents.