In my last article, I talked about finding my own talent-personal value orientation, so this article focuses on talent and analyzes whether hard work is a talent or not, and how to use talent to improve myself better.
The most important way to help us improve our personal value is to discover our talents and use them correctly. But most people have a great misunderstanding of talent and are wasting their talent in various ways.
Is hard work a gift?
Most people have at least three misunderstandings about talents.
Myth 1: Talent is ability: in fact, talent is only potential. You may think of Mozart when he was 65,438+04 years old. He heard a hymn in the church and wrote a tune from memory with two clocks and several voices.
It's unnatural. Mozart had completed 3500 hours of practice when he was 6 years old, and it was under the guidance of his father. His father is a musician, and he published The Playing of the Violin. He gave up his job as a court musician and devoted all his energy to Mozart. But even if we practice for so long, we can't be a genius like Mozart.
So the so-called talent refers to some innate qualities that make a person grow faster than the average person at the same starting point as others. In other words, the relationship between talented people in a certain field and ordinary people in that field, their efforts and level, are expressed by two solid lines.
Then most people often think that talent is equal to ability, and talent is a dotted line. As long as you have talent, you can achieve certain results without effort, and effort is just icing on the cake. In fact, talent only represents a kind of potential, and whether it can be transformed into ability can be practiced and developed the day after tomorrow, which is called "deliberate practice".
Misunderstanding 2, talent is not good, try to make up for it: in fact, hard work is also a talent.
Talent includes all natural instincts that can help a person grow faster. Then, if a person wants to grow faster, he actually needs two elements. One is the talent of ability, which can also be called potential. The second is the gift of will. However, when people talk about talent, they often only talk about the first element and ignore the latter.
Give a chestnut: if a person is naturally more empathetic, then he can certainly communicate better with others. However, if he doesn't like to communicate with others and has no motivation to develop his communication ability, he probably won't grow faster than the average person. Therefore, most wills are also gifts. Then the sentence "hard work is also a gift" makes sense. Because, hard work represents a kind of will, which is determined by personality, motivation, values and so on, and these are all innate characteristics.
This may be a desperate discovery. On the contrary, however, we should correctly apply our talents to the appropriate fields, which will be discussed next.
Myth 3: Talent is far from ordinary people: but in fact, everyone has talent.
In fact, each of us has a gift. From the perspective of willingness talent, everyone has his own personality, motivation and values, and of course he has his own unique talent.
As far as ability and talent are concerned, everyone has different potentials in different fields. I may have higher interpersonal sensitivity, you may have higher data sensitivity, and he may have a better sense of music. In fact, compared with yourself, you grow up much faster in A than in B. If you choose a field that can give full play to your A talents, you will get twice the result with half the effort. Therefore, each of us has a gift and we all need to use it.
How many forks are there between talent and result?
If you want to know how to use your talent correctly to achieve the final result, you need to first understand what kind of relationship between talent and result. I use mind map to make a decomposition.
The result of things depends on two aspects, one is the internal cause, which is what you did, and the other is the external cause, which is your luck.
Aside from uncontrollable factors such as luck and opportunity, let's look at the internal factors, that is, your behavior. Then behavior depends on three elements: knowledge, ability and will. In other words, when you know what your current position/role should do, have the ability to do it, and have the will to do it, then good behavior will happen.
Take chestnuts for example. If you start a company, you can correctly understand what a CEO should do, have the ability to do it, and have the will to do it at the same time, then this behavior is good, but whether it can be successful depends on some external factors.
In terms of role cognition, talent does not play a major role, so we will not subdivide it for the time being. So since ability and willingness have a lot to do with talent, let's continue to subdivide. I divide ability and will into innate and acquired parts. In other words, ability depends on innate ability, talent and acquired deliberate practice. And will depends on innate will talent and acquired environment and experience.
About ability, it depends on talent and deliberate practice. Then let's talk about the innate and acquired factors of will.
Chestnut: If you are naturally fond of learning new things, but the surrounding environment is not encouraging and everyone has no enthusiasm, then your willingness to learn will also decrease. Therefore, there are innate and acquired factors in willingness.
As for deliberate practice, it is subdivided into practice methods and enthusiasm. Method means that you know how to practice deliberately. Enthusiasm refers to whether you are enthusiastic about deliberate practice, because deliberate practice is a very hard thing, and it is a process of constant action, constant mistakes, constant feedback and constant adjustment. Of course, it is difficult to continue without enough enthusiasm.
That's how you wasted your talent:
We now know how talents affect the results and what are the fork roads in the process. But from the observation, most people have squandered their talents in this process.
Cost 1: Wrong place.
For example, your talent is data sensitivity. If it is used in the field of data statistics, the difference will not be great, because a person with weak data sensitivity will not spend much more time doing data statistics than you. But if you are an analyst in the consulting field, the talent differentiation will be great, and people with weak data sensitivity will really spend a lot more time than you to reach the same level as you.
If the difference of talent is the first dimension, then the determination of talent is the second dimension. In some fields, even though there are obvious differences in talents, the decisiveness of talents is not high. For example, people with strong data sensitivity are obviously different in the field of consulting. But for consulting work, what is needed is comprehensive quality, such as problem solving, communication, teamwork and planning. Even if another person is not so sensitive to data, if he has obvious advantages in other aspects, then you may not have the upper hand. However, if you use talents with strong data sensitivity in the field of big data analysis, you will have an advantage, because this talent is decisive for the success of this field.
So from two dimensions, your talent needs to be used in such a field: first, whether this talent in this field will lead to greater differentiation; Second, this talent is the key to success in this field. If you use it in the wrong place, the role of talents will not come out.
Expenditure 2: Lack of correct methods
As for the men's soccer team in China, people often lament that China has a population of more than one billion, but it can't find a football god of 1 1. In fact, it's not that you can't find the man of God, but that you need to practice deliberately.
Then why is table tennis always a grand slam in China and diving always a dominant sport for China players? Are they gifted? Of course not. This is the embodiment of a correct training method. These advantageous events, from the national team to the grassroots, have a high level of coaching. In these events, China exported coaches.
In the 10,000-hour genius theory, we often pay too much attention to "10,000 hours" and ignore the specific content of this 10,000 hours, that is, the correct deliberate practice method. Therefore, it is difficult to turn talent into ability without mastering the correct deliberate practice methods.
Expenditure 3: lack of enthusiasm and nourishment, lack of development motivation.
Deliberate practice is a difficult process, and it is not to repeat what you have mastered, but to challenge more difficult content. Then keep the enthusiasm of deliberate practice, and it is possible for us to carry out this arduous activity all the time. But enthusiasm does not come from hobbies, but from a sense of autonomy, ability and belonging.
Everyone can understand the sense of competence and belonging, so if the partner or environment you work with gives you a sense of belonging, it will definitely make you more enthusiastic. However, many people will ignore the sense of autonomy. If you can arrange your working hours, ways of doing things and ways of cooperation, you will be happier and more actively involved in your work. For employees, the stronger and scarcer your ability is, the greater the autonomy you can have.
Therefore, the lack of enthusiasm caused by involuntary, excessive challenge and lack of sense of belonging is the biggest obstacle to exerting talents.
Expenditure 4: distorted by secular needs.
During my 14 years' work, I switched from operation to sales in previous years. At that time, I was at a loss. For example, I don't know how to be more mature and credible, so I imitate my leader, a senior sales elder brother. I found his style very warm and open. For example, if you are sophisticated, you can use your personal resources to establish excellent personal relationships with internal teams and customers from top to bottom in a short time. I began to study his behavior and tried to help me improve myself through imitation.
But after a long time, I found that I not only lost myself, but it was really difficult to do it, because my personality, experience and even temperament were so different at that time. Later, a customer friend told me: When we first met, we thought your tone was too calm and not as impassioned as other salespeople, but later we found that you can always see the key points or problems of cooperation at once, so every time you speak, we automatically stop discussing and listen.
Everyone's talent is different, so the orientation of self is bound to be different. Ignoring one's own talent and imitating others is the most uneconomical way to work hard. And not only on how to position ourselves, we will blindly imitate, compare with others and waste our talents. The same is true in career choice. For example, many people think that the financial industry is relatively high, so they go to finance, and they think that the requirements for starting a business are very high, and then they start a business. However, we have never seriously considered whether these glamorous career paths in the eyes of the secular really suit us. If we violate the talent of ability and will, even if we enter the track of success in the eyes of the secular, we will feel very difficult, and then fall into a cycle of anxiety and self-doubt in comparing with others, wasting our talents in the process.
Therefore, if you can't firmly reject the secular and glamorous pursuit, you will be farther and farther away from the right track on the road of talent development.
Expenditure 5: Buried by the acquired environment.
We can often judge a person's occupation through simple chat. For example, a person who speaks very fast and has strong logic will be judged as a consultant; A person who is covered in chicken blood, keen on chicken soup and extremely enthusiastic about strangers, you will judge that he is selling a product. A bureaucratic accent, formal attire, you will judge that he is a person in the system and so on. These judgments are certainly not completely correct, but they do reflect the characteristics of some people engaged in these occupations. So did these people choose such a career? Not to a great extent, but the environment in which they work has changed these people.
Single content and repetitive work every day will lead to the decline of your active thinking ability; A very standardized work will lead to the loss of the spirit of challenging and overcoming difficulties; A job that deals with machines every day will weaken your social skills; A job that doesn't encourage yourself to study and take the initiative to take responsibility will make you lose the inner motivation to work hard. And these are the effects of the acquired working environment on a person's ability.
Therefore, what kind of working environment you choose will also determine whether your talents can give full play.
Finally, let me make a conclusion: everyone has his own relative talent, and using it correctly can make us get twice the result with half the effort. When summing up and reflecting on yourself, review your ability and willingness. Ability talent can only represent potential, and it needs deliberate practice to be transformed into ability. Look for fields with great differences in talents and strong determination, master correct and thoughtful practice methods, find jobs with more sense of autonomy, competence and belonging to maintain enthusiasm, resolutely reject the glamorous pursuit in the eyes of the secular, and avoid choosing jobs that are easy to bury talents.
I will share these knowledge points systematically with you in this article, hoping to discover my unique talent together.
PS: I haven't had time to typeset, I have arranged things with my notes, and then I will continue to update how to quickly discover my talents. If there are typos, or if you have any ideas to discuss, you can leave me a message directly.