As a teenager or young adult, do you find yourself thinking and dreaming “If only I had a great figure like Jennifer Lopez, my life would be so much better”? “If only she had the charm and wit of Jennifer Aniston, she could be a successful actress.” “If I were more like Mark Zuckerberg, I could be rich and successful and create the next Facebook.” “If you just got into Yale, could you be the most successful lawyer?”

Stop! Use what you have and turn it into something great!

But what do you have? What are your special talents and abilities? Yes, you also have talents and strengths that separate you from your friends, that make you unique, that give you a certain aura, quality and superiority. You have a natural ability within you to create something powerful and successful. Everyone is born with an innate talent. It’s just that most people don’t realize it. Those who do, harness and strengthen that talent to create success, recognition, power, and wealth with it. Finding your talent is the way to find your life purpose.

So what is your talent? I just read a book called “Now discover your strengths“by Marcus Buckingham and Donald Clifton. They define talent as any recurring pattern of thought, feeling, or behavior that can be applied productively. Some of the talents they defined in the book are: being curious, charming, persistent, responsible, stubborn , dyslexic. All of these qualities can be applied productively. Yes, even stubbornness and dyslexia. Someone who is stubborn can become a very successful salesperson or lawyer because their talent is to stand firm when faced with overwhelming resistance. Dyslexia can cause a person to use direct and direct language, non-authoritarian and full of long and complicated words.As noted in the book, David Boies, a celebrated trial attorney and one of the best litigants in the United States, uses the dyslexia for your benefit. He was recruited as an attorney for the United States government’s antitrust lawsuit against Microsoft. xia makes you avoid using long and complicated words. These words mean, but he does not use them in his arguments because he is afraid of mispronouncing them. This need to rely on simple words makes your arguments easy to follow. The authors note that “for David Boies, dyslexia is a talent because he has discovered a way to apply this recurring pattern productively, and by combining it with knowledge and skills, turn it into a strength.”

Here are some key characteristics that can help define your talents:

• What is your spontaneous reaction to a situation, event, crisis or conversation? How do you react? Are you loving, critical, emotional, or apathetic?
• Talents create wishes and wishes. What do you want to do on a daily basis and why?
• When talent is present, cause fast learning. Because you are talented at something, you learn something much more easily and at a faster speed. Can’t wait to get the next assignment. You read; you investigate; It looks for people who are knowledgeable in the same field and applies well beyond normal expectations.
• You feel a great satisfaction by using your talent. It feels good.

Using the list above, you should be able to find your natural talents. If you feel stuck and unsure about your talents, don’t worry. Society has conditioned you to focus on your weaknesses. As the authors of “Now discover your strengths“Pointing out” sadly, most of us have little sense of our talents and strengths. Instead, guided by our parents, our teachers, our managers, and psychology’s fascination with pathology, we become experts on our weaknesses and spend our lives trying to repair these flaws while our strengths lie dormant and neglected. ” The problem is that the focus expands. If we focus on our weaknesses, we get more weaknesses. Here are a couple of findings from the studies that Buckingham and Clifton have done:

• Parents were asked about which grade they would spend the most time talking to their child if they returned home with the following report card: A in English, A in social studies, C in biology, F in algebra. The results: 77% of parents said they would spend most of their time discussing failing algebra grades.
• The authors also did a search to determine how many studies had been done on depression. They found more than 40,000 studies on depression, vs. only about 40 studies had been conducted on joy and fulfillment.

As you sharpen and hone your talents, you also have to deal with and overcome your weaknesses. One weakness is “anything that gets in the way of excellent performance.” But don’t despair, here are four strategies to help you manage your weaknesses as you strive to build your life around your strengths:

1. Defeat whatever your weakness is by making a concerted effort to overcome it. You know you have to pass your French class to graduate from high school, so get down and get the work done. Keeping your focus on what awaits you will help you get through the tough times.
2. Design a support system or hire a Life Coach who will help you manage your weaknesses and keep you motivated and focused.
3. Use one of your strongest themes to overwhelm and overcome your weakness.
4. Find a friend, parent, or coach to help you deal with areas that are not your strengths.

Stop concentrating on the “if only”, instead, find your own talents. Use your talents and skills to create the life you want. Once you’ve discovered and determined your unique talents and abilities, begin to dream your own personal dream so that one day someone else will say “if only I could be like you.”