Talent has nothing to do with skill. Everybody is born with a whole set of talents. You can regard them as gifts since you simply receive them. Everything else you learn in your life are skills. You can change your skills, improve them, and add new ones. You have all your life to do so. Your talents, however, won't change. You have them for life. People are often good at noticing at what comes easily to other people. You come across people who are excellent at convincing others or repairing things. It is more difficult to recognize those abilities in one's self. It is not easy to distinguish our natural abilities from our learned skills. Some skills you'll find easier to learn than others. You can learn those skills faster for which you have a natural ability. Not everyone excels in learning foreign languages. It requires a certain ability to do so. In the same way, to be really good in your job your strengths need to fit precisely.

Consider the following: one woman (named Mary) scored as an "NF" nature on a Myers-Briggs test. She worked in a small office together with one other woman and spent most of her working day there. A big part of her day was getting through paperwork. Her actual job was to organize holidays for a small company. The only part she liked about her work was making phone calls, but she had been told several times that her calls took up too much time. Her trouble was that she was highly extroverted and simply needed to be with other people to feel energized. Spending the day in a little office with a colleague who prefers quietness rather than talking had been making her work day seem like torture.

Mary discovered she had a Tribal rating, and this in addition to being extroverted means that she had been in completely the wrong place. An extroverted Tribal is a person that has to be in action. It is someone who understands other people easily and often is "on the same wave length", thinking alike. Mary enjoyed organizing and was rather good at it, which was being helped by using her analytical problem-solving ability. These skills are useful where things need to be organized, categorized, etc.

Every so often Mary would get into trouble because she made mistakes in her paperwork. The reason for that was that she had no natural ability for visual dexterity. What Mary learned from the testing was that most of her natural abilities did not lend themselves to the work she had been doing. It therefore was no surprise that every day had been a struggle for her. She felt greatly relieved. There was nothing wrong with her. Everything that was not right could be changed.