Are You Cultivating Your Gift Or Resting On It? (And Why That Matters So Much in Business)

When we were small my sister and I took piano lessons for a short while. I would practice endlessly. My sis would hardly practice at all. I didn’t have an ear for music. My sister could hear something on television or the radio and “sound it out” on the piano. When I hit the wrong note I didn’t always notice. My sister hardly ever hit the wrong note.

My father always said that if he could combine my persistence with my sister’s ear for music he’d have a musical genius on his hands.

Maybe Dad should have been an entrepreneur.

I love music to this day, but what I have an ear for is communication, and in my biz that often comes in the form of copywriting. I somehow know what “sounds” right and what doesn’t. I can feel it in my bones when the words are arranged in such a way that they resonate with the reader in a deep, rhythmic way.

But I don’t rest on that ability. Nor should I.

Each of us has an ear for something, a special gift or set of gifts that heal some kind of pain or answer a longing in others.

The question is: what are you really doing with your gift that will matter beyond today?

Some of us are not using our gifts all. And when called upon we shrink away from them. To stand deeply in our gifts and for long enough requires a special kind of courage. (A little bravado doesn’t hurt either if it gets you up on the platform in the first place.)

It would seem to me that fully stepping into one’s gift is an ongoing, open ended journey. The entrepreneurs around me are certainly at varying points along that journey. Interestingly, the ones that are thriving aren’t so concerned with reaching the finish line as they are with honing their craft.

And that’s where entrepreneurship starts to get interesting in my opinion. The money flows differently. New people start to seek you out. And you show up in a different way, ready and willing to keep becoming more of YOU, moment by moment.

I challenge you to allow your gift to inform you, to guide you, to be a little better each day. Proactively seek ways to be more effective with your gift. Practice sharing it whenever the opportunity presents itself. Be more responsible with it. Be more useful with it.

Cultivate your gift like it’s the most important survival skill you could possibly have.

Because an ear for something will propel you forward only so much and for so long in business. If you are not disciplined with it, it eventually becomes a fun party trick. It holds people’s attention briefly, until they get bored and move on to some other guy with a lamp shade on his head.