Are you skilled or are you talented?

Skill & Talent

Often people compliment me “You are highly skilled Jane!” though I like that and smile back in return but it always left me thinking about the word “skilled”. Well my 3-page resume entitling the hard studious years, all of my certifications along with the industry experience literally shout out loud that I am highly “skilled”. But then why it doesn’t feel right when someone compliments my skill, that should be a good thing right?

So, the thing is I believe in talent more than skill as talent is original and gifted while skill can easily be bought and replicated; obviously, that’s my personal opinion. Having said that, I never said to not be skilled and just be talented. But, in our daily not so 9 hours job can someone actually complement our talent and not the skill?

When it all started?

To break it down I needed to understand what actually they complimented me upon, and it was obviously my work. Next came was what my work actually reflected was it my skills or my talent? The answer was definitely a skill and even if there was talent there was no right set of people to spot it forget about appreciating it. So, that led me thinking am I in the right environment? So, yeah my entire life, my career, and all my self-build life crumbled down in a few minutes!

In order to find the root cause of the problem I reached the bottom of this problem tree and realized I “myself” chose this environment and the group of people surrounding me when picked this job and that led me back to the skills in my resume, so basically “I was back to square one”!

Do we choose our work as per our skill or as per our talent?

But no, after several long brain denting thoughts and a trip down to memory lane I realized it started from the moment when I made my first career move and when I chose to go for a bland, boring, heart wrenching, dream killing job that was safe and paying me money instead of going for an initial zero income risky lane where I could really use my talent. So, I basically signed up for a job that is going to blow away my talent into dust (which I didn’t realize at that time), eventually my heart to rest and let my brain took over. Resulting, I literally ‘suffered’ through the entire time I was in that job!

That led me thinking don’t we all made such decisions in our life where we choose something just because it's safe! We pick that one initial job to pay our bills and then one bill leads to another and in no time a lot of time passes by and we never able to let go. Then every now and then when we see someone with a spark for their talent we feel guilty for not trying for ourselves hard enough. To support that decision, I would mention it's not our fault entirely as it has basically been taught us through entire life. Our parent pays for education so that we can have a safe future, some of us even marry just to ‘be safe’ and other numerous choices that we make just because we are too scared to go to a path that has ‘HUGE’ scope of possibilities but ‘doubtful’ scope of return!

How choosing skills as per your talent can be great

Had we chose skills as per our talent, that will help us to hone a unique quality that’s already there in you; it will just help to use it efficiently. Then we would eventually land into a profession where we will never get bored of our work, we would be thriving to be at work, we would love to invest our 100% and even more. I always feel motivated by artists singers, dancers because their skill and talent align in the same direction and that’s what makes it so magical as it’s a fine blend of creativity and execution.

But choosing your profession as per your talent not only is limited to artists, it can be people who love to sell things they go to business school, people who love to teach become teachers, who love to code chooses technical school and become programmers, who love fitness become trainers and so on.

 Talent gives you creativity and skill give you efficiency in its execution. But what makes the difference is the courage of choosing a way that could offer possibilities and not “Should” offer the possibilities and then converting the difference between could and should with your dedication and hard work.

We all make known choices calculating the “Best” return but down the lane why it feels “ It could have been more