Talent as an Incubator of Strengths

            Recently, on a long car trip, my wife and I were discussing the role of talents in relation to strengths. Stefanie was wondering how one might be able to use talents as a way to further develop our characteristic strengths. In our conversation she hit on an important concept that I call the Incubator Effect. This idea explains how we can use our areas of talent as a launching pad for our strengths.

Think of your areas of talent as Petri dishes where you can cultivate your strengths. Your areas of talent are familiar and comfortable, they are areas where you may feel more inclined to take risks. Remember how as a child you only choose to do those events on field day that you knew you had a chance to win a ribbon in? Well, adults are not that much different. We all tend to inhabit the areas of our lives where we have the greatest amount of talent and thus ease. These are areas where you can begin to experiment with you strengths.

In other words, once we have identified a particular area of talent and feel comfortable working in that domain, we can then use that space as a greenhouse for growing our strengths. 

For example I have a relative that plays in a very prestigious orchestra. She has great natural talent in music and has honed her ability to play the violin over many years. She looks right at home on stage and continues to improve year after year in her area of talent. She also has the character trait of being compassionate. By day as a History teacher her strength of compassion translates into reaching students and helping them understand important historical concepts.

The question is: How can she use her area of talent to help cultivate even further her strength of compassion. The obvious answer is: combine both areas. Teach a music class and use the comfort area of talent as a place to increase her strengths. But, there is another way to look at this.

Rather than combining two areas of her life, music and teaching, she can use her time at the orchestra as a place where she can find ways to cultivate compassion. There are many ways that this may be possible and it all depends on what each person can come up with. For instance, while rehearsing my relative might be able to show compassion to other members of the orchestra by making a goal to listen empathetically to two people per session.

Or, she may decide to study the composer’s life whose music she will be performing searching for ways to make and feel a compassionate connection with him or her. In addition she might decide to invite someone to the performance as an act of kindness and as an expression of compassion.

The possibilities of this type of exercise are only limited by our imaginations. The point, of course is to find ways in which we can grow our strengths while operating in the comfort of our talents. In this way not only will we be more comfortable with taking the necessary risks to achieve greater mastery of our strengths, but we will also be able to practice and better our talents.

            

A Recap on Happiness

I would feel remiss if I did not reiterate what happiness is. While I have discussed the outline for happiness and what it is not, I think that more clarification is needed. Previously I have described happiness as the pursuit of meaning accompanied by virtuous pleasure. As I have demonstrated, popular belief is that happiness is the exact opposite. Hollywood and the media often argue implicitly and explicitly that happiness is nothing more than the pursuit of hedonistic pleasure in its plethora of variations.

Thus the common idea of happiness is envisioned as having a life with the least amount of pain, the least amount of troubles, the most pleasure, and the most material possessions. While all of these things can be nice up to a point, we all know, deep down that they do not produce long lasting or fulfilling experiences of happiness. In other words we can often confuse pleasure with happiness.

As I have mentioned, I am not advocating for asceticism, the complete withdrawal form the world and its sensual pleasures, rather I am arguing that lasting happiness is achieved through finding meaning and purpose in life. Purpose is living our lives in accordance with our callings and values.

This means that we can be happy even when we don’t feel pleasure. We can be sick, poor, stressed or sad and still be happy. Yes, even sad. If we have purpose we can still be happy in the hard and easy times. Happiness is not an emotional state. Happiness is a state of purpose that transcends the physical and spills over into the spiritual.

The pleasure that we experience from practicing a meaningful and purposeful life leads to the ultimate expression of happiness; joy. Joy is the product of meaning.

True happiness is not selfish. Many of the happiness experts are implicitly asking us to be selfish. While I agree with the principle that we cannot serve water from an empty well, we must not turn so inward as to miss the chance for selfless happiness.

If our life’s purpose is not aligned with something bigger than ourselves, we are unlikely to achieve happiness or joy.