Your Gift: Are You Using It?

“Your purpose in life is to use your gifts and talents to help other people. Your journey in life teaches you how to do that.”

– Tom Krause

A bright future only for the select few?

Conventional wisdom teaches us that the likelihood of us being successful in life is directly proportionate to the level of education that we achieve. If we sail through exams and achieve top grades at university we are said to be ‘gifted’ and blessed with ‘bright’ futures.

So where does that leave the vast majority of people with an ordinary or less-than-ordinary level of academic ability? Are we consigned to live with cloudy, grey, or even dark futures?

Of course not!

Wake up time

Isn’t it time that we, as society, woke up to the fact that we are all – every single one of us – inherently gifted human beings?

Each and every one of us is perfectly equipped to make a small but unique and vitally important contribution to the ongoing evolution and development of this planet and all of its life forms.

Desperate efforts to signal ‘success’

And yet, we have become so obsessed with the fact that material wealth is the only accepted measure of our success that most of us find ourselves signing up to become slaves in the modern rat race.

We find ourselves doing things that don’t come naturally, that we have little passion for or that we simply don’t enjoy.

We bust our guts and sacrifice our health and wellbeing to afford a house in a good neigbourhood or drive a swanky car, or put our kids in a private school, in a desperate effort to signal to the world that we are ‘successful’.

Embracing a flawed definition of success

Of course, the real issue, as I have written about on many occasions before, is the flawed definition of success that has been foisted upon us and that we have, like sheep, willingly embraced.

And that, in turn, has been the cause of many of us largely ignoring the special gifts or talents with which we have been endowed and becoming disconnected from the unique purposes that we are here to carry out.

The ‘ungifted’

Let’s go back to the young man that I kicked off this discussion with; the one whose parents described as ‘ungifted’.

On further enquiry I was to find out that he had an exceptional talent for art – modern cartoon art in fact.

When his parents assumed he was goofing off in his room playing silly computer games instead of studying, he was simply following his passion and producing anime designs that could easily have graced the covers of top selling computer games.

Coming alive

That special creative ability was his unique gift and using that gift in the gaming field was his passion. It made him come alive!

The same is true for all of us. We each have a gift (or gifts) that, when acted upon or applied, makes us feel joyful, alive and excited to do more.

And all it takes is a little time, effort and imaginative thinking to come up with a way in which that gift can be harnessed in such a way to produce a reasonable income, which, with passion and enthusiasm, can grow to become a seriously good income.

Undone by modesty

If you’re a very modest person, you may be thinking “Well my gift is nothing special and certainly not something I could make a living from.”

Stop right there. I’m afraid you are your own worst enemy!

Either you have completely underestimated your special talent or you simply haven’t applied your mind to how you can use it to make the world a better place and leave you happy and well cared for.

Feeling unfulfilled or frustrated?

If you are feeling like a square peg in a round hole, you’re frustrated, unfulfilled or just lacking in energy and enthusiasm for life, then it’s quite likely because you are not using your inherent gift or talent to greatest effect.

Time out needed

Take some time out – or better still, hire a life coach – to help you uncover, understand and better appreciate your unique gift and how you can apply it in a way that benefits others while rewarding you in the way you deserve.

True success – doing what you were meant to do

The world needs all of us to follow our passions, to contribute in the way we are uniquely equipped to do so that we can – collectively – develop and enhance life on earth.

That’s what would constitute true success.

Gather up your courage, follow your heart and do what you were uniquely meant to do!