Strengths and weaknesses part 1. Knowledge, skill, and talent

 You have strengths and weaknesses. Their meaning for you is personal. You might focus on doing things through your strengths, while others focus on improving their weaknesses. For some reason, most of us believe that developing our weaknesses is more important than our strengths. You can get the performance of a Skoda by successfully tuning your truck, but you should focus on tuning your Ferrari. The latter is a wiser option, because in today's world, you cannot do without your strengths.

Knowledge, skill and talent


You can learn the first two. Talents are natural abilities that you cannot learn. You can refine them. Your talents refer to your natural and repetitive thinking patterns and cannot be taught. A talented accountant has e.g. the noble skill of being , i.e. he wants to get all the numbers right. Due to different levels of talent, students starting from the same starting point produce different results. The top level can only be reached if the talent coincides with what one does. This does not mean that learning is not useful for the gifted. Of the strengths, talent forms the essential parts. Knowledge and skills can be acquired, but unique thinking patterns cannot be acquired.


Knowledge means things you are aware of. You can gather information yourself and it can be taught to you. Information can be divided into two parts: facts and information based on experience. You have read the facts and your knowledge based on experiences are the things you have learned along the way. Facts can and should be taught. Knowledge based on experiences is learned by thinking about what was done and how the action has affected either you or others or by following the actions of others. A skill is how you do something. The best way to learn a skill is to break it down into pieces and put them together. The best way to learn is to practice by doing it consciously. Each skill and its parts should be learned in the right way at the right time in the right order.



Talent can be divided into three different categories. Motivational talent explains why you do something. It tells you the reason why you do what you do. Thinking talent tells you how you think, i.e. how you consider options or how you draw conclusions. The unifying talent tells you who you trust, who you work with and who you reject. Talent is made up of the connections in the brain that control its activity. Thinking patterns are different from others because all brains have billions of connections that work in different ways. They are different for everyone. Connections are mostly formed during the first three years of life, and by sixteen years, half of your connections are dead. Connections form mental networks that filter the information the brain receives. The network decides how to react to certain situations.


If you don't know about your talents, find them by following your natural reactions. They are reactions you cannot learn. They are at their best in stressful situations. In addition to natural reactions, you can think about things that you constantly miss. In addition, you can think about things that give you satisfaction and things you learn quickly. The things you were interested in as a child are probably the ones you are talented at. You have felt an attraction to them even at an older age. You'll learn faster the skills you're good at. Embracing them comes more naturally to you than to others. Satisfaction is also a sign of your talent, because those things have the strongest connections in your brain. Think about the things that make you happiest. It is one of the best tips for finding talent.


Anders Ericsson made a study that proved that talent alone is not enough for success. The end result was that getting to the top requires an average of 10,000 hours of focused and purposeful training. The average does not tell about individuals. In reality, the number of hours varied from a few thousand to twenty thousand. The need for hours depends largely on talent. When the number of hours in question is so large, it is clear that without talent, few people can cope with that amount of work. Since the amount of talent tells about repeated thought patterns, such an amount of hours is almost impossible to perform without talent. The interest in doing something ends quickly without the satisfaction of doing it, which is one of the hallmarks of talent.