What Did You Do Before You Knew What You Did?
The Childhood Clues That May Reveal Your Natural Talents
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What Did You Do Before You Knew What You Did?
When I was in junior high school, I worked at Publix bagging groceries. I don’t think I was particularly good at it, and I don’t remember how much I got paid. But I do remember how I kept myself entertained.
I made up stories about the customers.
As I put their groceries into bags, I’d look at what they were buying, what they were wearing, how they spoke, what kind of car they drove, and I’d create an entire persona for them.
I’d name them, decide where they lived, what they did for a living, who they were shopping for, what they were going to do when they got home, and probably a bunch of other things that were none of my business and almost certainly couldn’t have been true since I was just making it all up.
The way they behaved also became part of the story. If they were friendly, that told me something about them. If they were rude, that told me something else. If they gave me a good tip, great. If they didn’t, that worked too. Because no matter what happened, I was amusing myself by imagining their lives.
And then, sometime after I stopped bagging groceries, I completely forgot I had ever done it.
Until today.
But First a Story
The Checkout Line Revelation
I was standing in the checkout line at Trader Joe’s when the woman in front of me pulled on her windbreaker. This caught my attention because I live in Miami and it was approximately 900 degrees outside. So, I asked her why she was putting on a jacket.
She had a heavy Italian accent and explained that she usually spends a long time in the grocery store and she gets very cold. Today she was only buying two bottles of wine, so she hadn’t been inside long enough to need the jacket until now, and she’d probably have to take it off again as soon as she went outside.
When she left, Brandon, the young man checking me out, commented about the elaborate explanation she’d given me.
I told him I thought there was more to it. Clearly, she was going to open one of the bottles on the way home and was worried about spilling wine on her outfit. And judging by the outfit and her Italian accent, she probably had a yacht moored somewhere in Coconut Grove and was heading back to it right now.
Doing that suddenly reminded me of my job at Publix all those years ago.
I told Brandon that when I was his age, I also worked in a grocery store and that I used to make up stories about customers. I asked if he ever did the same thing.
He looked at me quizzically for a moment.
“Are you a writer?” he asked.
“Yeah, I am actually. Why?”
“Because you like making up stories about people.”
BAM!! Out of the mouths of babes, there it was.
Something I had done instinctively as a kid, long before I had any idea what I would do with my life, was a harbinger of things to come.
The Clues We Leave Ourselves
I spent much of my career trying to understand why people do what they do, what they want, what things mean to them, and how those insights can add value.
Apparently, I started practicing that while bagging groceries, long before I knew better.
Of course, I didn’t know it then. I wasn’t purposefully developing my powers of observation, practicing storytelling, or studying consumer behavior. I was simply a kid trying to make a boring job more interesting.
But looking back, the clues were there.
Research supports the idea that those clues can matter. The Association for Psychological Science reports that interests can help predict educational and career choices, performance, and success, and that interests can show continuity throughout our lives.
Gallup makes a useful distinction between talent and skill. Natural talents are recurring patterns in how we think, feel, and behave. Knowledge, practice, and experience help us turn those talents into strengths.
How to Discover Your Natural Talents
To discover your natural talents, look back at the activities that absorbed you before anyone told you whether they were useful. Notice what you returned to, learned quickly, or did simply because you enjoyed it. Then identify the underlying ability each activity required.
How about you? What did you draw before someone told you whether you were good at art? What did you take apart because you needed to know how it worked? What games did you invent? What did you organize, collect, build, perform, sell, explain, fix, or obsess over before anyone told you those things could become useful skills?
We spend a lot of time trying to figure out what we should do next. Maybe some of the answers aren’t ahead of us at all. Maybe they’ve been supporting us for years, waiting for a checkout clerk named Brandon to point them out.
Those clues can also help us understand our purpose and recognize the work that feels meaningful because it uses abilities we have been developing for years.
Turn Overlooked Instincts Into Meaningful Work
This is the kind of work I do with clients: helping leaders and teams uncover the stories, instincts, and overlooked insights that can make their ideas more meaningful, memorable, and useful.
If your organization is planning a keynote for 2027, why not invite me in? I’ll help your audience face familiar challenges differently, connect the dots between what they do and why it matters, and leave with ideas they can use to make their lives and your business better.
FAQs
How can childhood interests reveal natural talents?
Childhood interests show what repeatedly captured your attention before grades, job titles, and other people’s expectations shaped your choices. Look for activities you returned to, learned quickly, or did simply because they absorbed you. Those patterns are clues, not proof, but they can point toward abilities worth developing.
What questions can help me discover my natural talents?
Ask what you drew, built, organized, performed, sold, explained, fixed, collected, or took apart when no one required you to do it. Then ask what skill each activity used: observation, persuasion, design, analysis, empathy, storytelling, coordination, or problem-solving.
Can an early job reveal a future career direction?
Yes. An early job may expose the part of the work that energized you even when the job itself did not. Bruce Turkel’s grocery-bagging job mattered because he spent it observing customers and inventing stories, habits that later became useful in writing, branding, speaking, and consumer insight.
What is the difference between a talent and a skill?
A talent is a recurring natural pattern in how you think, feel, or behave. A skill is an ability developed through learning and practice. A natural talent becomes more useful when you add knowledge, technique, feedback, and experience.
Why do other people sometimes recognize our strengths first?
We often overlook abilities that feel ordinary to us because they require little conscious effort. Other people can notice the pattern from the outside, name it, and connect it to work or value we had not considered.
How do I turn an old interest into meaningful work?
Name the ability beneath the activity, find present-day problems that need that ability, and test it in a small project. The goal is not to recreate a childhood hobby. It is to understand the useful pattern behind it and develop that pattern deliberately.