Unlocking 'Your Hidden Genius: Aptitudes, Careers, and Personal Growth'
Resilience UnravelledFebruary 24, 202534:3555.4 MB

Unlocking 'Your Hidden Genius: Aptitudes, Careers, and Personal Growth'

In this episode of Resilience Unravelled, Dr Russell Thackeray welcomes Betsy Wills and Alexander Ellison to discuss their book 'Your Hidden Genius,' which offers a science-backed approach to identifying and harnessing innate talents.

Betsy and Alex explain how aptitudes—measurable traits influencing our ability to learn and excel—can guide career choices, personal growth, and even team dynamics. They highlight the significance of aptitudes tested through a series of games rather than self-reported questionnaires.

The conversation covers topics like the role of aptitudes in personal and professional life, the difference between aptitudes and personality traits, and the potential applications for this knowledge in various contexts. Betsy and Alex also touch upon the importance of understanding one's aptitudes for fostering resilience and satisfaction in both work and personal domains. Listeners are encouraged to explore their own potential by taking the aptitude assessment included with the book.

00:00 Welcome to Resilience Unraveled

00:11 Meet Betsy Wills and Alex Ellison

02:39 Defining Innate Talents and Aptitudes

05:14 The Science Behind Aptitudes

08:49 Aptitudes in Practice

11:10 Personality vs. Aptitudes

15:03 The Hidden Genius Book

16:50 Applications and Benefits of Aptitude Assessment

32:17 Final Thoughts and Farewell

The book can be found online or a link at our website https://resilienceunravelled.com

#resilience, #burnout, #intuition

[00:00:03] Hi, I'm Dr. Russell Thackeray and welcome to Resilience Unravelled, a podcast with new ideas, new thoughts, and new thinking about resilience. Guests with remarkable stories, products and services that can really power up your own mindset and resilience. You can also go to our site for more information, to ask questions, or to access some of our resources at www.resilienceunravelled.com. Let's get started.

[00:00:32] Hi and welcome back to Resilience Unravelled. On a balmy British February day, the palm trees are flying around behind us and I'm joined today by Betsy Wills and Alex Ellison. And judging by the smiles, they can't be from this country. First of all, good evening, both of you. Good evening. Hi, thanks for having us. It's an absolute pleasure. Actually, first of all, let's start with all the niceties. Betsy, I know you're in Charleston, which is lovely. Is that very nice? Where are you?

[00:01:01] How are you, Alex? I'm in Santa Cruz, California. Oh, wow. How are things over there? It looks like your background, actually. Not red flames. I thought maybe you were in the same place. No, actually, we're getting a lot of rain now. Oh, good. Which isn't much needed. Yeah, it's just been absolutely ghastly. And talk about resilience as a concept. You're a community that's going to need it, aren't you?

[00:01:24] Fortunately, quite a ways up the coast from LA. But yes, we've got some friends who are definitely, if not affected by the devastation, affected by the smoke afterwards. Yeah, very sad. I'm sorry to hear that. Tell us a little bit about what it is that you do. I'll start us off again. I'm Betsy Wills. And Alex and I have written a book called Your Hidden Genius. And it's the science-backed approach to unlocking and harnessing your innate talents.

[00:01:52] So it's really a revolutionary approach to making decisions around both your career and your career wellness, which involves your avocations and hobbies, as well as the different skills you develop throughout life to meet a world of work. We'll unpack a little bit about this as we go. But tell us a bit about yourself first, Betsy, if you would, and maybe a little bit about you, Alex, individually.

[00:02:18] Yeah, sure. Betsy and I connected really actually a few years before we started working on the book over a shared enthusiasm and passion for helping people uncover their talents in order to find more fulfilling and meaningful work. And years prior to that, and I'll let Betsy explain, Betsy had co-founded a company that basically put aptitude testing in a way we'd never seen before online so that more people could access it.

[00:02:42] And I run a counselling practice. And so I was using this assessment for years and years with my clients and given it to hundreds of clients and really believed in it. But with COVID, we realised we needed to put this in a book so that more people could access it. Because as you remember, of course, COVID, so many people were quitting their jobs and looking for new, more fulfilling work. So that was the time we felt we needed to get this information out there about how finding your talents can help you, can help direct your career search.

[00:03:07] Okay, great. Okay, we better start at the beginning. I suppose we better define what you mean by innate and talents, because those things can mean many different things to different people. So should we start with innate? Yes, I think that's a great place. I'm so glad you asked that, because most people have conflated the term aptitudes in a million different ways.

[00:03:28] So what we're talking about when we refer to aptitudes are 52 measurable traits that science has been studying since really the 1920s that range from tweezer dexterity, some people are very good at working with small tools, to inductive reasoning, sequential reasoning, spatial ability, this whole range of aptitudes that represent our potential to learn things quickly.

[00:03:56] And the fact is that most people don't realize they can be measured. Because here, before 10 years ago, really getting them measured involved visiting a center and having a one-on-one experience with someone, giving you a series of objective tests or games, and then finding out what they were. And just to back up, these are very important to know because they influence so many of our decisions and choices through life.

[00:04:24] The neat thing about aptitudes is that they start developing when we're as young as two years old. And then by the time we get to puberty, they're largely fixed. So you can take an aptitude assessment at age 17, 37, or 77, and you're going to score the same. It's not about what you know or have learned. It's really just about the seeds of your skills.

[00:04:48] That when you apply learning and practice to, the ones that you have in force become stronger and stronger, faster and faster. And the ones that we don't have are really more difficult to develop. And we all have a range of these. It's not as if it's good to have certain aptitudes and bad not to have others. They're all good to know about. So it helps you focus and spend your time on the things that are not going to be an uphill battle.

[00:05:15] So you're saying that there are, let's stop, we'll come back to 52 and why it's 52 in a second. But you're saying that you could have all 52, but the chances are you're going to have some rather than all. It's about finding those. Some are going to be stronger than others. And you have all 52. We all can use them, but certain aptitudes and all of us have them, but in different combinations are stronger than others for each of us. So where's the 52 number come from? That's quite interesting. What's the provenance of that?

[00:05:44] You have to go back to maybe the 1920s, but also really if you fast forward to 1940 in America and all over the world, people were looking at these. But in America in 1940, the military had to put a million people to work within a very short amount of time. So they put a lot of research behind identifying these different aptitudes.

[00:06:04] Reason being is that they saw that if they could pick people who had certain combinations to train them to fly a plane, to jump out of a plane or to navigate a plane, which were all different kind of combinations, then they could be more efficient in developing and training their service people. From there, the research continued.

[00:06:26] But again, it was another spike during the Cold War, as you can imagine, trying to identify young students who had an aptitude for sciences and mathematics. Yes. Yeah. Yes. And hang on. I just need to write down a question about that because of things which were changed. So the 52 created by the army were the things that were known at the time. In the sense you were working with a 1940s definition of what those 52 things would be. No, all 52 weren't identified in 1940.

[00:06:54] I'm just saying the science behind this got really big at that point because there was a need. And so they continue to discover different aptitudes even today. But there is a big algorithm right now that has been set up by the U.S. government, the Bureau of Labor and Statistics that map all 52 of these aptitudes to each and every job out there. So it's this Rosetta Stone of information.

[00:07:20] But if I know what your aptitude pattern is, I'm able to match you really efficiently to a whole range of opportunities that you could pursue that would meet those aptitude patterns that you have. And that's going to be different than mine, than Alex's or anybody else. It's as unique as your fingerprint, really. Okay. So we're constantly... Sorry. I was going to say we're constantly still... We're still learning, right? The 52 number isn't fixed.

[00:07:47] There's actually some research around what else can be innate, such as we talk about in the book, a woman who has been studied because she can apparently smell Parkinson's disease in its early stages. So this step is still being researched. Yeah. Well, the whole intersectionality thing, I was interested where you'd be going on that because where would you put ASD and things like that? Because, of course, are they talents or are they accommodations? Where do you sit with those things? That's so interesting.

[00:08:15] I work with a lot of different individuals in my counseling practice. And I certainly believe that neurodivergence, just like any kind of difference in evolution, it can absolutely be advantageous in the right setting. And we talk a lot in the book about context, right? Just like any aptitude, in the right context is an asset. And in the wrong context, it feels like a deficit. The same trait, right? And this is why we say there's no good or bad, right or wrong. A, good score, bad score.

[00:08:44] Or so many people are so used to getting a grade or a mark on these tests. And that's not how we see aptitude assessment. It's you either have this thing or you have this other thing. Both are assets, but in different contexts, in different environments. That's really fascinating because I may be picking this up wrong, but it almost implies, or I'm picking up maybe a hidden implication, that you're this shape and you fit into that box.

[00:09:09] But it's interesting how you can take people with different aptitudes and put them into a different context and you can find quite remarkable results. So I wonder what you think about that. I think let's just give you an example. I think that will crystallize this in a way. And it comes down to Alex and I in so many ways. But one of the aptitudes that we assess of the 52 is something called idea rate. So it's literally a measure of the rate at which you come up with ideas.

[00:09:37] And Russell, it has nothing to do with the quality of your ideas. All of them may be awful, but what we're measuring is simply the rate. In my case, they come very fast and furious. I have to have a glass of wine sometimes at night just to turn this thing off. Okay. And you've met people like me. And again, none of my ideas may be any good, but I do have a large amount of them.

[00:10:02] Alex, on the other hand, on the same assessment, scores as someone who has more of a slow drip with her ideas. It's a one at a time kind of thing. And that is not bad at all either. So in my case, people who score like I do, they tend to really enjoy creative writing, journalism, sales of many kinds. They've never met a blank piece of paper they didn't like in creative writing or something like that. Improv even.

[00:10:29] So you don't want your surgeon or your pilot to have that. Okay. That's not, it's not necessarily good that I have it. And it's not necessarily bad that Alex doesn't have it. It's simply what it is. So then you can find out what you can do with it. But Alex, you can talk about how it affected us even in our work. Yeah, because it does give you a language. So I used to get quite frustrated in brainstorming dynamics when I was first starting out in my work.

[00:10:55] And I thought there was something wrong with me that I would get so fatigued and burnt out in these brainstorming sessions. And then when I took the assessment when I was 25, I then had this language to talk about that and advocate for myself. And I also started to see this thing that I thought was a deficit as a plus, as a bonus. And for example, when I was starting my own company, being an implementer and an executor and staying super focused on the here and now was very relevant and useful.

[00:11:18] When we wrote this book together, it was a nice sort of back and forth push and pull between Betsy's rapid idea generation and my ability to take an idea and start working on it. And then it got frustrating sometimes too, but then you are slowly able to see what each other brings to the table. That's amazing. So I like the idea of the aptitudes. How does it fit into personality?

[00:11:44] Do you ignore that altogether or is that part of the correlation piece? Think of personality as a layer. So Enneagram or Myers-Briggs or any of the types of self-reported instruments, by the way, when you're taking a personality test, it's asking you what you think about yourself. There's no objectivity to that. So they ask you questions in a million ways to suss out the same answer every time to try to get to am I extrovert or introvert, et cetera.

[00:12:13] So personality matters a lot, but it is a very different layer than aptitudes. Alex, you can take that sort of what you think about that. Russell, I've always loved any sort of self-awareness quiz, even the obviously unscientific ones. But I think anything to start a conversation, to go from self-awareness to empathy, right? So the more we understand ourselves, the more I really believe we can understand others. And so whatever tool I think can facilitate that is wonderful.

[00:12:38] And so I've always been a huge fan of personality measures such as Myers-Briggs and Enneagram. They've given me a lot of insight into my relationships and how I relate to others and how I show up in the world. But I wouldn't, and I've talked to a lot of Enneagram counselors and experts, and they would never say you would choose your career based on your Enneagram type. It might tell you how you show up in the office place and how you relate to your boss, but certainly not whether you should pursue engineering or medicine.

[00:13:04] And so the aptitude piece gives us this other layer, but I don't think one replaces the other, if that makes sense. I think what they do is they take all of these grainy, confusing parts of ourselves, and then together they paint a picture. Most people think they know that they've taken an aptitude assessment, and they haven't.

[00:13:23] Because it's quite difficult to assess your aptitudes unless, as I said, until 10 years ago, you had to be at a center, and it was about $750 to have them assessed. So it would be unusual unless someone had invested in that. The good news is now, and the whole reason we wrote the book, is about in 2010, I co-founded a company, and we raised quite a bit of money to bring those analog assessments into an online environment.

[00:13:52] Because as computing power now made that possible. But each question in our aptitude assessment had to be normed against 30,000 people, and then each combination of questions. So it's quite difficult and specialized. But now that it is online and available, the cost is almost nothing. And we included the code to take the assessment with our book. So you talked about idea generations. I forget the exact phrase you used. So how are you doing that? Because obviously you're using a questionnaire.

[00:14:21] No, we're not. You're not? Okay. No, there's no, I don't care what you think. I'm not asking you whether you think you have a lot of ideas. There's basically in the assessment, we assess 14 of the 52. And you won't know what is being assessed. You could guess maybe, but it's not told to you. And during the assessment, you're going to feel like throwing your computer out the window at times because you'd be so frustrated. It's a game.

[00:14:48] And other times you'll be saying to yourself in this game, why was that an assessment? That was so easy. That's just nothing. But that's how aptitudes are is it's really telling you, oh, that came easily to you. So it didn't even feel like a challenge. And this other thing did. So that's what we're meeting out here. Yes. So you basically, the things you find easier because you probably have an aptitude for them, perhaps. And we tend to discount those things. So it's nice to have them objectively measured. I see. And you keep using this word objectively, Betsy.

[00:15:18] So you've got me so fascinated. And so you've mentioned this sort of random thing. You said this, I think three times now, this book we've written. And you've not told us anything about it. So you better talk a bit about the book. So we got together in 2020 to start working on this particular book. So Your Hidden Genius is the name of the book. And as Betsy said, it comes with a code to take this assessment we've been talking about. But what we found is that we've given this assessment to hundreds and hundreds of people.

[00:15:47] What we found is that the power comes from having a guide walk you through your results. Betsy and I can't yet clone ourselves. So we feel that the book really will be your guide. So what we set out to do is we created a really dynamic matrix to make sure that we were covering all of our bases in terms of telling stories of real people who'd taken this assessment and had interesting career navigation stories or career pivot stories.

[00:16:13] We wanted to make sure that people reading this book, whoever picked up this book, could find themselves in these stories. So that was the biggest really heavy lift of this project was creating this matrix and making sure we were covering all the demographics. So we interview everyone from, I think, 17 to 70. And people who are in technology, who work in medicine, who we interviewed a celebrity chef. We interviewed someone who worked at the White House. We interviewed family members.

[00:16:40] We interviewed childhood friends who we'd lost touch with and had really interesting careers. And so we interviewed a whole range of interesting people with interesting stories to illustrate these aptitudes and how you might see them in your day-to-day life. And it's interesting where you put it, because, again, you seem to be implying, and I might have, again, picked this up wrong, that it's about recruitment. But what you're talking about is aptitudes. It just sounds that you could use it for team working. And I was waiting for it.

[00:17:09] I was going to get onto dating in a minute, because it sounds suspicious like we could be using it for that, because that would be great, wouldn't it? Oh, we can talk about that. We don't want it to be used as a sorting hat, right? The whole point of this is to put the power back into the hands of the person navigating and managing their careers. Because this is the big exciting reality in the world today, is that we have more agency. And we want to remind people that they have the agency. But you can't have that agency if you don't really know what you're bringing to the table.

[00:17:39] So this is to help you discover what you're bringing and then to bring it, right? And I think we should let you know, Russell, 3 million people have now taken this assessment. And it takes 87 minutes to complete. So it's a series of 14 games. You can start and stop between them. But that's the whole thing, is that we have a lot of information and data. And we worked with the U.S. government and their map of all these aptitudes. And so we can give you really good information.

[00:18:09] And so when you invest in taking the assessment, your time and the purchase of the book, you're going to get a huge reward at the end because you get this whole online platform of matching. But also a lot of insight, as you said, into your relationships. That's a huge thing. Because my husband and I are quite different in our aptitude pattern. And so now we have a language to talk about that. And the point of all these things is not the score. It's what you do with it, isn't it?

[00:18:36] That is because I think a lot of people spend a lot of time taking tests, but they don't really do anything with them. Yes, you can do a lot with this one. I can tell you because it's it. I'll give you another quick example. My husband has something called perfect pitch, which is one of the musical aptitudes of which there are three. But pitch is also the two. Sorry, just a tonal memory and rhythm memory. OK.

[00:19:02] And really, you have to have all three to be satisfied in your work as a musician. And some people do. But if you have one and not the other two or two and not the other one, you have to find other ways to use it. But pitch is really your ability to discern, really find differences in things. So it affects what this doesn't taste right, that's crooked, everything you're sensing. That sound is wrong, of course, is what we all think of.

[00:19:29] But being married to someone who has perfect pitch can be extremely challenging because they tend to identify what's off all the time, 24 hours a day. And I used to take some of the comments my husband would make that were identifying things that were off as criticism and personal criticism.

[00:19:52] But when we realized it was the pitch discrimination that was just dominating his mindset, I had a lot more empathy and we had a very different discussion. I still wanted him not to be quite so allowed about what was wrong with things, but it wasn't personal anymore. Interesting.

[00:20:14] And the teamwork piece that you brought up earlier, Russell, 100%, in fact, we spent a lot of time building out free discussion guides and worksheets for teams, whether it's like a book club or a professional team. I'm actually going to be leading a church council retreat using this information on Saturday to help people find their roles, right? So it's not to keep people out. But once you're in, what are the best tasks and what are going to be the most fulfilling tasks for you?

[00:20:40] And to be able to communicate that with your team and to have this understanding, oh, this is a little more fatiguing for me. And we have some language now to share around that. So given the hypothesis at the moment is that the world of work is going to dramatically change over the next two to three years. But tell me why those aptitudes will fit into such a new world. AI's got me down.

[00:21:03] But one thing that does keep me uplifted is that aptitudes, when you know what they are, like this compass that will steer you to true north. Regardless of what's going on in the world, if you know what your talents are, I really believe that becomes your lifeboat, regardless of what's going on out there. Yeah. Because, well, again, this is measuring the seeds of your skills, not the skills themselves.

[00:21:26] So you can keep coming back to, OK, I've got an aptitude, a strong idea rate or strong inductive reasoning. And you can say, OK, what skills can I develop from here? Red deploying those aptitudes in all different combinations to meet the market as it exists. Because let's face it, the world of work has been changing for a long time. We're in maybe a new level right now, but it's going to happen again and again.

[00:21:54] But what doesn't change are your aptitudes. Are there any sort of gender-based differences or any other intersectional differences which affect the scores or affect the context? What we've actually found is many women pigeonhole themselves very early into sort of helping jobs. They choose helping jobs.

[00:22:18] But what we find when we see aptitude scores is a lot of women, for instance, score more suited in their combination for things like computer science than men. That's a shocker, I think, to people. There certainly are some tendencies, for instance, some of the spatial abilities sometimes geared more towards male. But a lot of women don't think of themselves as spatial. And what we've uncovered is a whole lot more women actually are.

[00:22:45] But most things are about that combination, not the single aptitude difference. Yeah. Now, I suspect I know the answer to this question, but I'm going to ask it anyway. Is there an ideal time or period in your life or age where you should take the test? There's a lot. I've been to a lot of... I'm just taking a tin hat off now because I know you'd say that. But surely it's more useful earlier on in your life, isn't it? Yes. Yeah.

[00:23:11] But I think there also is a moment where this lands on you in a more significant way. So I've given this assessment to a lot of 15 to 18-year-olds. And I can tell you that the response is dramatically different when they come back 19, 20, 21 to review the results. If you've had a little bit of experience outside of the home and you've removed yourself from some other influences or maybe you've fallen on your face a couple times,

[00:23:35] you might be more receptive to really taking stock of your innate gifts. When we're 15, we're convinced we're going to be fill in the blank and very few people can convince us otherwise because we're influenced by peers, by what our parents do, by what we watch on TV. But that's why taking inventory of aptitudes, not just interests, is really the more unbiased way to plan our careers.

[00:24:05] So you're saying that aptitudes change over the lifetime? No, they don't change at all. Interests can change. Interest in personality slightly can change what you're interested in, your passions. But most of the time people self-report their interest and they're so influenced by other people or how they've been socialized that they really lack exposure to adequately use that as a guide. But aptitudes are, again, your true north.

[00:24:30] I took the assessment for the first time when I was 34 and it changed everything for me. But my aptitudes have been with me all along. And so that's what we say about in the book. We've interviewed 80 different people from age 17 to 75 and everybody gets something out of it because they think back and they go, oh, I always knew that. But I put it on the back burner or gosh, I really had a hint that I was good at that. But I thought everybody was.

[00:24:58] So it gives you the confidence and permission to pursue things that have been with you all along, but maybe haven't been developed. So you can't tease us and say at the age of 34, it changed everything. And then without telling us what it changed. I was home with my children and ready to get back into the workforce. And when I found out about it, I did everything from I went back to graduate school. I ended up working for a hedge fund for years and in financial services.

[00:25:24] But on the side, I also realized I had great interest in writing and technology. And I started a blog. And that art blog that I started actually ended up having a million people on it and was highly successful. But I only did it for joy and for fun. And that's what changed for me is I knew I didn't need to be on one track. I could be on a couple of tracks and build a really fulfilling life outside of just my day job and what I was paid to do.

[00:25:54] OK, the burning question. People want to get the pause on the test. With the book for $29, you get the assessment included. Oh, really? Yeah. And the assessment on its own costs almost $50. So this is a wonderful opportunity for people to both get the book and the assessment. And so you can buy the book. But also, if you already have the book, you can redeem your code to take the assessment at yourhiddengenius.com. And it's sold wherever books are sold also on. Yeah, downloaded, audiobook.

[00:26:23] It all comes with one code. They're all unique. I don't know many books like this. And we had to go to a lot of trouble to do it this way. Yes. It's a great value. So everyone can find out what their aptitudes are. And those worksheets we were talking about, Russell, that you can download to talk about the book with your teams, those are also at yourhiddengenius.com. And so those are free downloadables. OK. It sounds like you're giving a lot away for free. This does not. How are you two doing on the. Well, now that you've said that.

[00:26:54] Raise the price. No, this is so much more than a book for us. This is a mission. As I said, three million people have taken the assessment because the company that offers the assessment, which I co-founded, YouScience, has really focused on that high school to college to work demographic. And the book is really for everyone else because we knew there's so many people who have found themselves feeling obsolete or they found themselves in a new work workplace.

[00:27:22] They're bored or they're burnt out. And the need is constant. So having the ability to revisit what your aptitudes are and then have the whole online platform to look what your opportunities are and grow much more and find your avocations is really the reason we wrote it. I think a lot of people's depression, you talk about resilience so much. It's usually some kind of unmet aptitude.

[00:27:50] I think we talked to lawyers, some of whom have a spatial ability, for example, that they didn't uncover or honor. And these are like itches that need to be scratched. OK. And so one lawyer pivoted his practice more towards finding clients who were in real estate so he could be around more kind of 3D thinking with real estate development. But he also started going to tag sales or garage sales on the weekends and he would buy broken toasters.

[00:28:20] And come home and tear them apart, put all the parts on a table and then put them back together just because it gave him an outlet for this innate ability that he was not using. And I know that sounds silly, but so many of the things that we have innate that go undeveloped rear their ugly heads. That's really a huge part of this is broadening out what we might be able to do. I'm interested in that comment you just made there.

[00:28:48] You wouldn't say resilience is an aptitude then? I would not say resilience is an aptitude. I would just say that to become resilient, we often need to first look at ourselves and be self-aware of what our opportunities are and realize the things that might be getting ignored. And that that can shore us up to be more resilient is to be among the walking, the living and the walking, not the walking dead. Yeah. Yeah. Very good. And to play to your talent, but feels good. And so you then find that motivation.

[00:29:18] It's like motivation is not an innate aptitude. You find motivation when you're in your flow and you're in your element. Yes, I agree with that. I think motivation is an outcome, not an input, isn't it? People don't seem to understand that. Yes. And just on the UK side, by the way, of course, this is in pre-order stage at the moment. So you're releasing by the end of February. You're obviously live in the States, but not everywhere else yet on Amazon. Maybe you can get it online digitally though, or download it. I don't know.

[00:29:45] But we'd love for more people in the UK to experience this. We've had a lot. Have you spelled everything properly if it's coming to the UK? Have you got any words in like aluminium, which have to be spelled properly? I do not think we used that word. Thank goodness for that. It's very difficult. We avoided it. So Ruffel, I'm curious from you, from listening to what we have said, just to reflect on maybe what your aptitudes might be. If you had, I know you don't know all the names of them right now, but are there things that

[00:30:14] come really easily to you? For instance, we ask people sometimes to think about an aptitude as using your dominant hand. Okay. Things that just flow. So are there things in your life that you can point to that? It did amaze me earlier when you're talking about musicians, because I used to be a professional musician, have all those three things that you mentioned. But I don't torture my wife the way you were being tortured. So I suspect I've got more empathy in mind.

[00:30:42] I would suggest the thing I have is a huge and innate amount of curiosity. Okay. A lot of curiosity. But that's interesting about the musical aptitude. Did you always know that you had that? You start learning an instrument at the age of nine or 10. Right. So whether an aptitude can be built and developed and grown, this is the thing I'm thinking about with things like that musical thing that you talked about, because perfect pitch can be learned. It's a different form of perfect pitch.

[00:31:08] It can be, but not by someone who has none at all, for instance. Oh, yes, absolutely. You may be close to it and then you can get perfect, if that's what you're saying. But if you were doing music that you took to it like a duck to water, think about it that way. Sure, practice, you were motivated to practice because you enjoyed it and it was satisfying you. But the same person in your year at school might have to work hours and hours just to become competent.

[00:31:35] Whereas for you, it was a quick win to really keep enjoying it. And that's how to think about an aptitude. Yeah, no. You can learn anything with practice. Yeah, I love it. And the time we've been talking, I've had 4,863 ideas. So I think you and I, Betsy, have got a lot in common. We know what you're... We don't want to talk to boring Alex who's just talking about operational stuff. He's not boring. Just making the money and really make it work. We just have some ideas. Yeah, that's right. You need an Alex in your life.

[00:32:03] Choosing which ideas to follow can be a challenge. Yeah, absolutely. And I think it's the melding together of talents, which is what makes it interesting, isn't it? And I guess that's what you were talking about, Alex, earlier when you were talking about the teamwork. There are powerful pairs, right? If you're an implementer, a concentrated focuser, and you're also sequential, which is the ability to put a lot of disparate concepts and ideas into a sequence that makes sense, you'll probably be pretty good at leading a team.

[00:32:31] You're going to be the implementer. On my team, I hire all people with high idea rate, and I'm the one concentrated focuser. So I want to hear all their ideas, and then I want to be the one to pick one. I do it the way around. To execute. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, absolutely fascinating. All right. Okay. We need to draw to a close, sadly, because I could talk to you both all night, but I need to be a bit more respectful of your time. So let's just run through this again. So the book is called Your Hidden Genius, available at all good bookshops and on your

[00:33:00] website, which is also yourhiddengenius.com. And I'm guessing you're all over socials as well? Somewhat. Mostly LinkedIn. LinkedIn. So you can look at our LinkedIn profiles. Yes. Yeah. Okay. Well, that's brilliant. It's been an absolute joy. And as soon as that becomes available, I wonder if I can get downloaded on Kindle tonight. Oh, sorry. There you are. You're just straight into action. Please do. But Russell, call us back when you've completed it, and we'll go through your results personally. Don't tempt me.

[00:33:28] I shall be like that bad smell hanging around asking for more and more advice. We'd love it. We'd love it. The bad penny, not the bad smell. Let me rephrase that. Not the bad smell. But we're happy to go over the results anytime. Absolutely. Very good. All right. It's been an absolute joy. Thank you so much for spending time with us this afternoon. And rush out and buy it, because I'm certainly going to do that. It'll be great. Thank you so much, Russell. Thanks for having us. It's been a pleasure. You two take care. Bye-bye.

[00:33:59] Hi. I hope you found that episode useful and entertaining. If you want to support our work, please go to resilienceunravel.com and you can become a member there as well. You can also send us a question there and even apply to do a podcast. You can also leave a review on Apple Podcasts or any of the other podcast hosts of your choice, as well as getting hold of some useful resources about resilience and a whole lot more. Join us next time on the next edition.

[00:34:28] of Resilience Unraveled.

personality,aptitudes,potential,