if you can’t enhance it, don’t kill it
Talents are funny birds. They come in different shapes and forms. Some are very loud from their birth, and some need some time to flourish. Some are defining species to their biological animal family, and some are in the periphery of that same group.
Some of us get lucky and from an early age we have a very obvious talent – in math, or physics, or chemistry – and we easily climb up the social ladder to become successful. Some of us whose talents are not so obvious, or who have not mastered them well yet, lag behind. And I am most scared about those people. Because they could have talents, but unless encouraged by parents, teachers, doctors, they might never even find out.
If you can’t enhace someone’s talents, don’t kill them.
Plenty of these people are actually very talented at one thing – drawing information from the right sorces for the right solutions of the right problems they face. (the best part is, often people talented in one thing end up crisscrossing fields anyway too. they never stay in only one field!) So this practical skill is indeed very useful.
We see the demand for crisscrossing of fields and holistic solutions so much today. What drives this is the so many different contexts we need to use specific knowldge from different fields.
Social Cognitive Psychology. Probably my favorite example. On the fence of social psychology, cognitive psychology, and neuroscience, social cognitive psychology is the study of how we interact with the world. It uses neuroscience to prove with hard observations how our behavior is shaped more by our subconscious and not conscious. It is probably the one field that has a chance at getting answers about what is our consciousness and how physical and chemical is it exactly.
Environmental Science. Say whaaat?! It is one of those fields that leaves you startled at first. What does it mean? Well, that’s more on the fence of biology, geology, and chemistry (and add a lot of statistics and probes) for the sake of figuring out what goes on with our environment. It is a hot science. Literaly almost. We need a lot of solutions for current problems so we need people to figure out things. And quickly.
Strategy Planning for avertising. This is not a science. You don’t get your bachelors in this. There is only one (that I know of, and i have researched) university that offers a MA degree in this. Consider this: planning is very young and comes in various shapes and forms. It is veeery interdisciplinary, drawing knowledge from psychology, anthropology (cultural), cognition, business, technology, art, everything. One of the best things about it is, you will find solutions for the problems you solve, based on how you phrase the problems.
These are three very different interdisciplinary fields but they all have one thing in common. The people involved in them have that intuition for understanding a whole system in its innerworking and spotting the missing pieces, and finding the right answers. These are people whose real talents became clear as time went by. They were always intelligent, and probably they friends knew they had the potential to be grand within themselves. But they were not that good at math. Or it took them more time to solve an equasion. But they were good at connecting the dots..
It is not easy to be interdisciplinary. It takes a heck of a lot of brainpower and many many mistakes. Building that intuition to navigate your mind like a dashboard from minority report takes perseverance. And that is a freakin’ good talent.
