Develop Your Talent
To stand out as Top Talents in any profession, just the raw talent alone is far from enough. Like an Olympic athlete, you need to push yourself to develop your genetic athletic make-up to become a powerful athlete. When you add lots of learning, training, & practice to develop your Natural Talent, this innate wiring will become your super strength. Your strength is where you consistently perform well & where you can achieve true excellence.
When you start with your dominant talent - things that you do well naturally, and you put in lots of investment to develop it, your raw talent actually serves as a multiplier in the equation of developing your strength.
Let’s call this the Strength Equation and see how this works.
Strength Equation
For example: suppose in a scale of 1 to 10, 10 being the perfect score, Player A’s natural talent for tennis is a 3. He is determined to become a Wimbledon player so he puts in a lot of investment to develop his tennis skills. While he may have a perfect 10 for investment (the money he spent to hire private coach and the time he spent practicing), his maximum potential for building strength in tennis was only 30 (3 x 10). This is how hard work offsets a lack of natural talent to reach just a basic level of competence.
On the other end of the spectrum is Player B, he may have a 10 on talent and just a 2 on time invested, which is clearly a waste of talent!
And once in a while, we see a player like Roger Federer who had abundant natural talent combined with hard work and the right development opportunities. His combination of a 10 in both areas – which yields a total score of 100, compared with Player A’s potential of 30 and Player B’s potential of 20 to become a Wimbledon player – is what can elevate someone to a totally different level.
This formula applies to every discipline in life, from engineering, computer programming, medicine, to fashion design, teaching, or marketing. The reality is that a person who does not have too much of analytical & logical thinking ability is unlikely to be a great engineer or a computer programmer. And the person without much compassion will never become an empathetic counselor or nurse.
This is clear from 1997 Gallup’s scientific research that each person has greater potential for success in specific areas, and the key to human development is building on who you already are – where you have the most natural talents.
We Help You Devise a Strategy to Develop Your Talent into Your Strength
In OptimaCalling programs, once we have a clear understanding of your Natural Talent & your best career options, we will help you devise a strategy to start developing your raw talent into your strength. For students, this may involve making decisions on your educational plan such as selecting college major, graduate study, or professional school; it may also involve getting internship or research opportunities. For professionals, this means getting advance degree, continue education, training, or professional licensing or certification.
Many people think after getting an academic degree in certain area means they are capable of doing well in that discipline, until when they get into the real work. With an average IQ, most people can learn, be trained, and get a degree in many disciplines, including technical degrees. However, getting a degree is one thing, performance is another. You can only perform where you have strength! But education is only one very small part in the equation of developing your strength. If you have true talent & passion in certain area, you will continue making efforts to achieve excellence by self-learning, training, & practicing for the rest of your working life. That’s how some standout and become true professionals while others become mediocre employees or being laid off.
To launch & sustain a successful & happy career, having the opportunity to develop & leverage our strength is more important than our role, our title, or even our pay. In this talent-driven global economy, we need to know our own strength to fiure out where we belong.