Transcript

Austin: Over the decades of studying people and studying successful people right, we found that there were these thousands of talents that people who were successful had. So Don Clifton and his team, in researching those talents and looking at them, found that there were some things that they had in common. That these talents did have some similarities if you will. And so through that research and through that study we found there were 34 main categories, where the similarities were consistent enough that we could sort of group them together. So those 34 categories we call the 34 themes of talent, and what that does, what having these themes does, is it puts a little more of a verbiage and a language around what these talents look like, right, because the talent by itself can be tough to discuss, it can be tough to pin point, but by categorising it into a broader theme, it allows us to understand it a little bit better.

Don Clifton: For a long time we've thought that you could train people and by training them you could create talent, you don't, you can create skills and you can create knowledge that make you more effective in what you do. And if you base that knowledge training and that skill training on strengths that you have, you'll just be a lot more effective.

Austin: Some of the words are common in our vocabulary. Things like Communication, and Empathy, Strategic, we see those words, we get it. We know what those words mean, we understand sort of how we think they show up in the world, but when you think about them from how we define them as a theme of talent, well a talent is something we're innately doing, we're not really consciously activating talent, right, it just sort of kicks in. So a lot of people will look at a word, and say oh, I want that, I want Empathy, I care about people. But understanding that the talent, that sort of natural way of doing it, you can't really choose to do it or not, that's just either who you are or who you aren't.