I enjoy relating the tale of the violin virtuoso goldfish being asked her greatest skill. After a lifetime of practice she responds without thinking, oblivious to her most natural of talents – swimming and breathing under water. It was a tale that came to mind regularly during a period in which I was contemplating my career options and rebuilding my résumé. I found it hard to pick out my strengths – like trying to tickle oneself. It’s as if we have a blind spot to our own super powers; we need others to point them out to us.
On those occasions when I only had my own insight for company I had most success when approaching the problem indirectly. This oblique approach requires you to look not at the accomplishment itself but rather what caused the accomplishment to be. How had the goldfish become a virtuoso? Was it single-mindedness, incredible stamina, intensity of focus, a competitive spirit…? The ability to play the violin well is the end result but it’s not an ability in itself, at least not insofar as I define ‘ability.’ My oblique approach has clear limitations. It allows you to uncover skills you’ve tapped, but like the goldfish’s natural aquatic capabilities it ignores the ones we’ve neglected entirely.
It doesn’t help that it is in my nature to prize those things that require effort or sacrifice. When I have suffered in order to acquire them they have an exalted status in my ego’s temple of personal accomplishments. Anything I can do with my eyes closed doesn’t get the attention it deserves, and yet surely it’s those things that come most easily to me (and comparatively less to others) in which the greatest opportunities lie.
I’m surely not alone in this. We laud the rescuers, and rightly so, but less so the preventers. How often have you worked with people who have been praised for working crazy hours to fix a problem, sometimes with public reward, and how little praise is heaped on the person who works hard to make sure such a problem never happens in the first place. An ounce of prevention may be worth a pound of cure, but that doesn’t hold true when we look at the value we assign to effort.
To understand our strengths we could try looking to things we enjoy, but what we enjoy and what we’re good at aren’t the same thing. In his book, “Good to Great,” author Jim Collins suggests we look to the intersection of Opportunity, Passion and Talent to find our calling. (If you want to read more on this topic it is referenced in this medium article by Colin Robertson.) Clearly passion and talent are different things. Our goldfish may be talented at swimming but might not necessarily enjoy it, which is awful if you’re a goldfish. (Clearly there are limits to my analogy.)
We also need to look to what is facile for us. What do we find so easy to do that we don’t even have to think about it? And therein lies the conundrum, to bring into our thoughts that which comes to us so readily that it barely has to enter our mind in the first place. To resolve this we always come back to finding a friend, and preferably one who is not like us, because another goldfish is likely to have the same blind spot. There is insight as well as strength in diversity!
As I close out my thought process on this time in my life the value of diversity would seem both the right place to end, and an important one, but I can’t shake the image of a stream. I’m not sure why.
Finding your talent isn’t the end of the journey, it’s what we do with them and where that’s important. Michael Phelps is an incredible swimmer. It helps that his body almost seems to have been designed for his craft, but he still needed to dedicate time and attention, he needed to sacrifice. He found a trade that matched his natural aptitude and elevated it with, quite literally, Olympian effort.
Maybe this is why I keep circling back to the stream. We can spend a lot of time finding out we’re a great swimmer, but how does that then serve us if we spend all our talent and effort fighting the current? Heck, we might even be in the wrong river. It’s when all these things come together – talent, effort, the right part of the stream, in the right river – that everything aligns. We might even see a goldfish playing a violin.
