This is somewhat difficult because I have so many interests. Plus, it's hard to write about those things one is good at, without it sounding like bragging or "tooting one's own horn", so to speak.
In all honesty, I truly believe that talents are gifts from God for which we ourselves can claim no credit. What we do with these gifts however, is up to us.
If I was to ask my wife what I'm really good at, she'd probably start with the following:
- Cooking, as in creating my own recipes.
- Building, fixing, creating things. I just love to make things, and fix things. I've always been fascinated with how things work, from the mechanical to the scientific.
- Creative writing: This is something that I really enjoy doing, but have no real outlet for currently (I don't consider the mechanical writing that I do every day at work to be in this catagory). All throughout high school and college, teachers would comment on this ability. Again, it's a gift I've been blessed with.
- My memory. I'm blessed with a really good memory. My wife claims it's photographic, but I know better...it's not. It's another of those gifts, and one that really enhances all the others. My wife doesn't like watching
Jeopardy with me...I don't know why...
I can identify with the ability to "read people", Childbride. In my work it's very helpfull as well, especially the ability to read when someone is lying, which I've become quite good at. I think it comes from a developed power of observation. Many people are oblivious to their surroundings. They don't listen and observe that which is right in front of them. They're so caught up in what they're thinking, that they don't take the time to support that thinking with critical observation. I think this is part natural ability, and to a larger extent, conscious development of that ability.
It's the gifts that I see in others that really impress me. Several years after my mother died, my late father married a woman who is a phenomenal portrait artist. I'm in constant awe that she can observe the same things that I do, and yet what she sees flows through her hand and onto a canvas in an incredible likeness of what she's observing. It's something I just can't understand, let alone duplicate, even though I've watched it happen right before my eyes.
I had a friend who plays keyboards. After hearing a song only once, he could play it back without any errors. I'd be smacking myself in the head with the neck of my guitar after watching this, knowing that I had to practice my part of that very same song for hours in order to do what he did in one sitting.
When I observe people like these, I don't consider what I'm good at to be anything even approaching extraordinary. I guess it's a matter of perspective. As my late father's wife once said to me (paraphrased); "Everyone sees the talents of others as so much greater than their own. I couldn't do half the things you do, if I spent the rest of my life trying." Yeah, maybe so. But she creates beautiful works of art that boggle the mind...
ancake:
