There’s a completely stupid LinkedIn post making the rounds about “10 Things that Require Zero Talent.” It has things like Being on Time and Attitude and Passion on it. The typical things that summarize a person’s personality. Some people go above and beyond and some don’t….sure it isn’t about talent but some talented people do it and some don’t.
I did a stupid thing the other day – I read through the comments on one of these posts to see things like:
But unless you are working in the Arts Talent ads little value to your enterprise.
Everything on the list is all about talent
I would move #6 to the top. If you don’t have the right attitude, many of other things may not matter.
I wanted to slap my own face to get these comments out. But on thinking about it further a lot of people are thinking these same things. They are thinking that talent doesn’t matter and that Attitude is more important that Work Ethic (hint: neither is necessarily more important than the other depending on situations). For the most part it is very silly to be arguing over the relative importance of personality traits.
Here’s how I break it down: when you hire, know what skills, traits and talents matter for the job you need. If I’m trying to grow a small business I may need an extremely talented developer to do something hard and complicated and I’m willing to go with talent over everything else. However if I’m running a finance department for a Fortune 500 company I need people with more solid, steady personalities and character traits than anything else – extra talent at Excel Spreadsheets doesn’t buy much at that point. Go somewhere in-between and you may need an odd mix of characteristics.
I really wish people would stop sharing these stupid things because they boil complex subjects down to talking points that have no value to real situations (although they make it easy to write about the things wrong with them). Deal with situations in front of you and the specific needs you have at the time. Don’t let yourself buy into the falsehoods that get passed around as solid thinking on social media.
Yes, I often preach about simplicity but humans and their characteristics are not simple.