Plus the four steps to make your habit work for you.
Lewis Schiff
Contributor
Author, Executive Director The Business Owners Council, co-founder of BEN Global Mentorship
September 28, 2016
It was during a team-building exercise many years ago that I first discovered a talent I had no idea I possessed. The exercise itself was pretty run-of-the-mill -- name one special skill or talent for each person in the room. I certainly wasn’t expecting to hear anything life-changing, but I was taken aback when multiple people told me that I was very good at asking questions.
It was not really something that I had ever considered to be a personal talent. It was, and is, just something that has always come naturally to me -- something that I’ve never really had to think about. And that’s the thing. Your true talent isn’t something that you need to focus on to do it well, and it isn’t something that you will consider remarkable.
Rather, it is something that you should work on honing once you discover it, and it is definitely something that should be incorporated into your career. I’ve spent years working on turning my knack for asking good questions into a career and have helped thousands of other people do the same with their own talents.
Asking good questions and translating the answers to help other people access great insights has become what I call my “language” -- the way that I communicate with the world. One key thing that I’ve found really successful entrepreneurs have in common is that they’ve built their businesses around their own languages. They’ve identified their own innate special talents and have worked to build careers based on their ability to do what they do best. No wonder they wound up so successful!
Once you identify your own talent, you’ll know your own language, and you’ll be one step closer to building a successful career. This is such a basic, foundational insight that I call it “The First Habit.”
Why do I refer to this as a habit instead of an insight? Because knowing your talent isn’t enough. Making your talent work for you is an ongoing process, requiring you to develop it, hone it and build it into a viable career. The obvious applications for your talent probably won’t jump out at you immediately, but don’t get discouraged. It may take a few nights -- or weeks -- of brainstorming to come up with a viable business idea that really takes advantage of your skill.
