General dissatisfaction is my special skill

A new(ish) colleague from another town is coming to visit in a few days, and we've been tasked with chatting to her about what we do and what sort of things we're particularly suited to helping with.

The person coordinating this visit said something along the lines of "just tell her what you're good at."

She then paused for a moment, looked up with a gleam in her eye, and asked, "What *are* you good at?"

It's a surprisingly hard question to answer.  Just stop for a moment, and imagine someone turned around and asked you that question.  What's one of the first things that pops into your mind?

If you could set aside any and all social conventions concerning modesty and what you think people expect of/from you, and you had the opportunity to stand up and declare to the world something you honestly believe to be a special skill that you have (whether you utilise it or not), what would you say your "special skill" is?

Being "churched", I often come across references to the parable of the talents.  Jesus tells a story about three servants who are given talents (coins) by their master while he's away on business.  The first servant is given ten talents, and he invests the money and earns ten more.  The second servant is given five talents, and he also invests it and doubles the amount.  The third servant, given only one talent, is too afraid of stuffing up - so he buries the talent in order to give back exactly what was given to him.  Not a penny less, but also not a penny more.

The master comes back and rewards the two profitable servants, but throws the cowardly one out onto the streets, then gives his talent to the servant who had the ten talents to begin with.

The "moral" of this story is what has become distilled into the saying "the rich get richer and the poor get poorer" (although I can't say that's what Jesus actually meant).

This parable might very well have been an economic treatise, but if you give a Christian a parable, they're going to find something warm-and fuzzy buried inside it.  This is why we tend to latch onto the word "talents" and talk about how, when it comes to the metaphysical gifts we've been given, we need to use them or lose them.

Whenever I come across this parable I find myself wondering "What *is* my talent?  What can I do well that I could be putting to good use?"

It's sometimes not the best trail of thought to follow, because there's a fine line between "what am I good at?" and "what am I good for?"

Depending on my level of general dissatisfaction with my life at that point, the answer I often come back to is "nothing".

I do a lot of things, and I have a lot of interests, and I'm not particularly bad at anything (except, maybe, fencing, time management and anything to do with remembering what I'm supposed to be doing), so I usually get by without noticing I'm not particularly good at anything.

Jack of all trades, master of none.

When my colleague asked the question "What *are* you good at?", my first instinct was to hang my head and say "nothing", but then something else popped into my mind.  A different answer to what I would have expected:

"General dissatisfaction."

And I realised it was entirely true.  This is my special skill - this is what I'm particularly good at:  Finding things that need to be improved.

Now, you could argue that that's not really a skill, it's just whinging.  You'd be right.

But I take some comfort in the fact that I don't just find faults - I also think of solutions.  I'm an ideas person, as lame as that sounds.  I keep nutting over "problems" until I work out what I might do if I was in a position to fix it, or produce something better.

My biggest problem is that I don't know what to do with those ideas.  I'm usually not in a position to fix it or produce something better.  Nine times out of ten, I don't even know who is in a position to do anything about it.

I offer suggestions when I can (and I can tell you from experience that most people actually aren't interested in being offered suggestions), but usually I'm just standing at my desk thinking "you know what would be really great...?"

If I was a proper inventor, engineer or developer, I'd probably be able to turn a lot of my ideas into something real, tangible and worthwhile.  Unfortunately I'm a person who writes FaceBook posts for a living (okay, that's not my whole job, but it's part of my job, so it's still true).

However, I feel a strange sense of hope, now that I've finally identified my "special skill".  The first step to putting your talents to good use is figuring out what they are.

And, if "general dissatisfaction" sounds like a pretty lame talent, allow me to rephrase it:

"I want to change the world."

It means more or less the same thing.