Your Interests, Skills, and Talents

CORE CONTENT | 0.6 min read

Interests

Put simply, interests garner your attention and enthusiasm. Interacting with these things brings a level of enjoyment, both preventing boredom and making your work something to look forward to.

Skills and Talents are Abilities

Skills are learned (i.e., acquired through education, experience, or training) and represent a level of proficiency at given tasks. It follows that we are most effective at jobs we have all the necessary skills to complete. Being highly skilled makes you more employable while making your job less personally difficult.

On the other hand, talents are often considered innate. Pursuing a field that you have a knack for can allow you to achieve more with less effort. Even if you don’t love the work, being naturally good at it will make it easier to achieve goals and gain skills in that area.

REAL WORLD EXAMPLE | 0.4 min read

You can find some through line in just about any combination of interests, skills, and talents. Take, Devon. He loves the Olympics, has strong proficiency in math, and though he’s shy, he has always been a captivating storyteller. Devan may consider a career in Sports Reporting, leveraging his math skills to analyze statistics and trends. He could even invest time in building public speaking skills and go into Sports Broadcasting. Devon would likely find such paths engaging. Even if they present some challenges, they are not so far out of his comfort zone to be overwhelming.

KEY TAKEAWAYS | 0.4 min read

• Burnout is an overwhelming feeling of exhaustion caused by constant stress. In your career, these stressors may include work being unfulfilling, too difficult, too time-consuming, or too emotionally or mentally draining, among other things.
• Interests appeal to you, skills measure your proficiency, and talents come easy to you. A career that strikes a balance between these aspects is less likely to cause burnout.
• If you do not currently have the skills to pursue a career path, take into consideration how difficult and resource-intensive it would be to obtain those skills and the potential return on that investment.

PRACTICE | 5 min journal

What are you interested in, and what is it about those things that interests you?

What are you talented at (have a “knack” for), and do you enjoy doing those things?

What skills have you acquired, and how can you hone those? What lengths are you willing to go to acquire new skills (e.g., how much time/money)?

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