We Are Blind to Our Own Gifts

Consider the cruel irony of how we're often cosmically terrible at recognizing our own talents, those gifts that are so fundamentally woven into the fabric of our being that they've become essentially invisible to us. We walk around carrying these incredible capabilities, these inherent strengths, and somehow manage to completely overlook them.

There's this weird cognitive blind spot we develop around our natural gifts, precisely because they're natural. It's like how fish probably don't spend a lot of time contemplating the metaphysics of water. The things we're genuinely good at often feel suspiciously easy, almost fraudulently so, which triggers this whole spiral of self-doubt where we think: "Well, if it's this easy, it must be not taken seriously." This is, of course, completely backward logic, but try telling that to your brain when it's doing its greatest hits compilation of all your supposed inadequacies.

And so we do this absolutely crazy thing where we go searching for success in all these other domains that feel appropriately difficult and therefore legitimate. We convince ourselves that “real success” must involve struggle and suffering and probably a hefty dose of approval, while simultaneously ignoring this perfectly good talent that's just sitting there, probably collecting metaphorical dust, because it commits the cardinal sin of being enjoyable. We've somehow internalized this puritan work ethic thing where if something doesn't feel like pulling teeth, it can't possibly be worthwhile.

But your talent is never the product of external coercion. It’s not the skill you forced yourself to study because it looked good on a resume. It’s not the career path your parents nudged, or shoved, you toward because it felt practical. It’s not the thing you have to motivate yourself to start doing.

Our natural talents are literally just an extension of our consciousness, our particular way of processing and reconstructing reality. They're so deeply embedded in who we are that asking us to notice them is like asking us to notice our own breathing. It's the thing that makes you stop mid-whatever and think "yeah, that's exactly how I would do it" because, well, it IS exactly how you would do it. It's you, distilled into action or thought or creation, as natural as blinking or the way you walk or your particular laugh that you probably also don't think about very much.

The real kicker is how we keep looking for these big, dramatic revelations about our purpose or our path, when really the answer is usually sitting right there in plain sight, disguised as something we love doing so much we barely consider it noteworthy. It's that thing you do that makes time disappear, that thing people always compliment you on that you put no effort into, that thing you've been doing for so long you can't really remember learning how to do it.

Recognizing this pattern is actually the first step to breaking it. Once you understand that the ease of something might actually be a feature and not a bug, it's like putting on glasses you didn't know you needed. Suddenly you can see that the very things you've been dismissing as "too easy" might actually be your north star. And yes, I'm aware of how woo-woo "follow your north star" sounds, but sometimes the woo-woo things are mocked precisely because they're true enough to have become cliché.

We've been culturally conditioned to expect success to wear a certain costume: it should look like struggle, feel like sacrifice, taste like bitter medicine. But maybe the universe isn't actually a cosmic sadist who designed success to be exclusively painful. Maybe success can actually feel like coming home to yourself. Maybe the fact that something comes naturally to you isn't a sign that it's worthless, but rather a flashing neon indicator that you're onto something real, true, and deeply connected to who you actually are.

And isn't that a much saner way to live? To recognize that perhaps our talents aren't despite their ease but because of it? That maybe the universe, in its infinite wisdom or cosmic accident or whatever you want to call it, actually set things up so that the things we're meant to do, the contributions we're meant to make, actually feel good and natural and right? So trust the ease. Trust that you can put down the heavy backpack of "shoulds" and "supposed tos" and just follow the things that light you up inside, the things that feel as natural as breathing, as automatic as your signature, as effortless as being exactly who you are.

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