The concept of gifts and talents is a major success indicator for mankind. It is extremely important for everyone to know what gifts or talents they received from God and to make deliberate efforts to develop and deliver same to the market. The reason is simple. Our gifts and talents are our strengths and we should play to our strengths. They were given to us to make way for us here and if we use them well, they will make our dreams a reality.
How do we go about this great concept? Knowing our gifts and talents and using them well is what we want to discuss in this post.
Find your gift
Your gift is a calling. It is something that calls from within and you are restless and unfulfilled till you answer the call. Your gift is what God gave to you when He made you. He gave it to you so you can function effectively here on earth.
Joseph, the son of Jacob, had the gift of dreams and the interpretation of same. Then his gift of administration surfaced as he matured and had leadership thrust on him, at the home of Potiphar and then after his release from prison.
To interpret dreams and administer people is wisdom. Joseph had divine wisdom bestowed upon him, but the gift of dreaming dreams and interpreting dreams manifested before. He dreamt dreams as a little boy. He told dreams to his father and siblings. The young lad was aware. He found his gift of dreams at a young age.
Skill your gift
Gifts are what we receive from God. Skills are what we give to ourselves through our own personal efforts. God gave us gifts, but we give ourselves skills. These skills should align with the gifts. The skills that we acquire are used to develop our God-given gifts and talents so that we can become relevant in our space.
Apart from the regular skills of acquiring formal education like Engineering, Medicine, Law, ICT, Architecture etcetera, there are informal skills like tailoring, plumbing, mechanic, and the like that are relevant to us.
There are also soft skills like critical thinking, problem solving, leadership, emotional quotient, collaboration, and such like that are critical to effectively using hard skills. These fall under what we refer to as essential skills. Essential skills are like values; they are like software or programs that we must install within our psyche.
Without essential skills, our hard skills will not do us much good. Can you imagine if an emotionally intelligent doctor attends to a patient? Imagine what happens when an emotionally intelligent or critical thinking teacher delivers a lesson to a student. Can such a service be compared with that of the same professional who is deficient in those essential skills? Many adults who complain about being inadequate or who are less achievers in certain subjects blame their deficiencies on the approach of the teacher who taught them.
An emotionally intelligent doctor is a plus. His or her approach in caring for a patient instantly administers or speeds up healing for the patient. The same is a teacher whose emotional and mental abilities have been developed to high levels of competence. They make learning seamless. They are change compliant.
Serve with your gift
Service is the access to leadership. A servant is the leader who is responsible for the welfare of others. His scorecard is his results. The absence of true and genuine service or servant- leadership is perhaps the biggest hindrance to our living the quality life that we should live as humans.
The majority live sub-human lives because they have been denied quality lives through resource mismanagement of a few who usurp authority. Ideal life is only about service. Everything that was made was made to serve the purpose of another. That is the way to sustain and keep the ecosystem buoyant.
You must make yourself available for service to others through practice. There is no way anyone of us can exhibit or display our gifts and the skills we acquire to skill our gifts if we do not serve others with our gifts/talents and skills.
You do not have to be in government to be a servant. You do not have to be in a public service. You can be working diligently to serve others with your gifts and skills in your corner and be of benefit to men in your space. You are not in that space by accident.
A man's gift, not his certificate, makes way for him. While this is not a swipe against formal education, the education you earn through discovery and becoming aware of your gift, and deliberately developing it through skilling, is the best education that you can get.
The formal education through schooling must be an access to the further development and skilling of your natural gifts and talents. If it is, otherwise, it is a disservice to humanity.
Excel with your gift
Through excellence your comparative advantage is earned. Diligence in service is required. Humility is required. Humility works for dignity in service. A humble person is a reasonable person. One proof of this quality is that such a person takes feedback well, whether the feedback is constructive or not; or whether the critic has not constructed anything to earn the qualification to give feedback.
When you appreciate your gift, you will nurture it to such an extent that it will bring you before great men. This was the case of Joseph, David and Daniel.
Joseph and Daniel's gifts of dreaming dreams and interpreting same brought them before kings: Pharaoh and Nebuchadnezzar. David's gift and skill of playing the harp so well brought him before King Saul. He played the harp so skilfully at such a hertz value, perhaps between 432 Hz and 440 Hz, to have made King Saul to be healed of his bouts of insanity.
He played at a perfect pitch. This means that David trained his ears to a certain pitch perfect frequency to be able to use music as a therapy. He played with an unction. It must have been a rare synergy between gift, skill and service. This synergy earned him proficiency.
Some things were essential for these men: They were obedient and fearless. David was obedient and exemplary. He exhibited dignity in labour. He chose to do the dirty job, staying with the sheep. Through staying with the herd, he learned to trust God in separation. He connected with himself in separation and learned the art of self-development and improvement.
David trained himself to be courageous in the secret. He killed lion and bear while he served his father as a Shepherd boy. It was a prelude to serving God on a higher scale. If he could endanger his life for the life of the physical sheep, he could do the same for the human sheep by hazarding his life before Goliath.
Jack Ma advised young people who nurse the thought of going into entrepreneurship to work with small companies first, and from there, they would hone the skills at doing the same for themselves. Vusi Thembekwayo says the same. He advised that young people should get a job first and learn the entire business processes through working for others and engaging their resources.
If all that you do at your workplace is your routine bit and then earn salary without deliberately applying yourself to learning and building yourself, you are in for personal disappointment.
To excel in what you do is to serve others continuously with it. It is nurture. Through it, you hone and update your skills in alignment with your discovered natural gifts and talents.
You are wondering about being multi-talented right? My advice is this. David was multi-talented. He played the harp to keep himself company while listening to the streams running, he tended the sheep, and he used the sling to protect the sheep. Through herding the sheep, he learned about nature so well he became a poet. Read the Psalms of David and you will better understand. If you are multi-talented, do not hesitate to use them all. They will find their place as you operate in your space.
Be rewarded for your gift
On the ladder of productivity, in the process and cycle of same, the last rung or step where you are exceptionally rewarded is when you have excelled and proved your competitive advantage.
This happened in the lives of the characters we have chosen to reference in this article: Joseph became Prime Minister in Egypt; Daniel became Vice President in Babylon; David became king in Israel.
Men like William Gates III, Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, Aliko Dangote, Jack Ma, and others that many of us know are living this reality today. They became entrepreneurs and great business men through the discovery of the treasure buried within them.
It is not just about who they knew. It is about the potency of their deliveries. You can't reject the deliveries of these men and do quality work. You have to accept them, their service and their inventions or products in order to become relevant in what you do. Ponder this, please.
As I conclude, let me point you in the way of the external gifts that God has placed around you.
For the married, your partners are God's gifts to you. For parents, your children are God's gifts to you; the same applies to children. At the workplace, colleagues are gifts to colleagues. But the key is that interdependence or collaboration does not happen without independence and that is the entire essence of self-development--the process we have been talking about. For all mankind, everything in nature is a gift for which we must all be thankful.
Your ability to manage these gifts effectively places you in the place of invaluable service and benefit in your space. Be kind to nature. Use your gift well. But do remember that you cannot use what you do not know that you have.
