Find your talent before your comfort

I had an interesting lunch conversation with a couple of my friends who were curious about my recent status update that read ‘Find your talent before your comfort ’. So the conversation revolved around the subject and here is what I told them. Over the last decade I have had the opportunity and privilege to meet a varied set of professionals across the world in various industries. Some of them have been brilliant strategist, some of them great executors and many of them passionate people but there has been one special group of individuals that have always intrigued me, I would like to call them ‘placeholders’.  For those familiar with marketing you will know that we use this term for pictures, objects and text that are temporarily placed instead of the real content.

So what is so special about these people who I call as placeholders and how do you identify them? Well here are some of my observations

• They clearly are not cut out for the job

• They show no passion or love for what they do

• Each task is chore for them and they often suffer from a lack of motivation

• They need to be constantly reminded about task they need to complete

• They are usually the bottleneck for any job if the process requires the task in hand to go through them

• They come in to work grumpy but leave with a smile

So the question that arises is why would anyone want to be this placeholder individual and why would they want to be in a situation like this? Well the answer I think lies in my post title – ‘Find your talent before your comfort’. I believe most of these individuals are just too comfortable with their status quo. Their current jobs and career helps to pay their mortgage and bills. In reality these people are trapped by their financial commitments and they find themselves stuck in rut of doing a job they are not happy with or have no talent for.

If I had one advice to give to youngsters who are starting off their career it would be ‘Find your talent before you find your comfort’. Do yourself and your future employers a big favor and list down your talents and skills and map them to jobs and industries that you fit in. Before you go off and get married and have kids that come with a mountain of financial burden go and discover your real talent. If you are good at something you will most definitely make money of it.

By the way if what I have written has upset you then I seriously recommend that you introspect. I know it more complicated and tougher than what I have articulated here and maybe I may have over simplified it a bit. But the fact of the matter is that if you don’t enjoy what you do, then you got to seek a way out. Don’t be a placeholder person, go be the person that you were meant to be and not what you are forced or comfortable being.