Strength = Talent + Skill + Knowledge

Today, I read about the equation Strength = Talent + Skill + Knowledge in the book Go Put Your Strengths to Work: 6 Powerful Steps to Achieve Outstanding Performance.  The book is a guide to transforming your job into an experience that lets you spend most of your time doing what you do best.

"Talents" are traits that you have that make you enjoy some activities much more than others.  Examples from this and past books by this author include "competitive", "ideation", "self assurance", "empathy", "includer", and "winning others over".  These aren't strengths by themselves.  They are just part of the equation.  If you have a trait such as "empathy" and have no skills or knowledge to go with it, such as training in medicine or psychology, you don't have a strength.

Strength comes from cultivating and applying skills and knowledge in an activity that fits with your "talents".  Because my 14 year old son is "competitive", "analytical", and "self assured", he enjoys expressing strong opinions about competitive sports.  But to turn these passions into a strength, he had to add skills and knowledge to his "talents".  He had to develop writing skills.  He had to turn himself into an encyclopedia of sports statistics and principles.  He had to spend hundreds of hours studying game film.  Only then did he combine his Talent + Skill + Knowledge into the Strength that allows him to be one of the top three writers on NFLMocks.com