At Home,
Dear Rose,

It’s been a while since we heard from you, how are you doing? How are your studies coming on? How are your friends- Chika, Raymond and Mary, I hope they are all fine? By now, I hope that you are through with your exam? Is the result out yet? In your last letter, you said that Raymond had an accident; I hope he is responding to treatment and recovering from the injuries now? What of Mary, is she still leading her class? I hope everyone and everything is okay, if so, glory be to God.

The purpose of my letter to you today is to advise you on how to discover your talent, like you asked me in your last letter. I have given it a lot of thought and made a lot of researches about it but I am yet to get enough points to put forward to you in response to your question. However, I hope the points discussed below will go a long long way in explaining to you what a talent is and how to discover one’s talent.

To start with, talent is a marked natural ability or skill. It is an inborn or innate ability to do something exceptionally well. Also, a talent is something that you do most comfortably even if it is not so easy for others to do. An author (Oromidayo) once said that talent is the potent magic that makes you walk through the wilderness of this life without getting devoured by the hungry lions and terrible beasts. I could give you more than twenty definitions of talent but all of them will still be saying the same thing. Whatever definition one gives it, one thing is certain; talent is natural and it is inbuilt, it is not acquirable.


Having talent is a great privilege and the most beautiful part is that ALL human beings are endowed with different talents. That’s correct; all human beings are given talent by God. Many people may say that they don’t have any talent but this is falsehood, everyone has a hidden potential and this potential is enough to transport one to the top in life. Sadly though, many people don’t know that they haven’t recognized their talents, so they think they don’t have all. One young speaker once said that the graveyard is the richest place in the world because many people die with untapped potentials. I agree with him.

Is talent the same with education? No, they are very different. While talent is a raw material deposited in a person by the laws of nature and existence, education is the refinery that brings it out in all its glory. A raw gold is a useless piece of metal until it is melt in a furnace that is when the beauty comes out. So think of talent as that raw gold and education as the refinery that brings out the best in the talent, both of them are complementing each other. Talent without education that will fine tune it, give it shape, radiance and value is a useless potential. Sadly, many people are in the world today who is blindly going through life, wondering why they aren’t successful despite being talented. Such people have the talent but lack the education on how to bring out the best out of their talent.


This past week when I took my car to the mechanic’s garage for a repair, I met a young apprentice at the workshop. This young was singing Fuji and he was good at it that without any musical instrument or backups, he sounded awesome. I was marveled. For almost an hour that I spent there, this young man kept singing and he didn’t say a word twice, everything he was saying was offhand. It got to a point that his boss had to shout at him to stop singing and focus on what he was doing. I didn’t say anything but the thought came to mind- unbidden like a raging storm- that this young man has the talent but lacks the education. He would prosper more as a singer than a mechanic but who would tell him? If he had worked more on his singing, focused on going to a college to study music or things related to it, he might eventually be able to be the next Barrister (a late Fuji icon who was considered by many as the greatest Fuji musician that the country has ever seen). Because he loves singing more than machines, he will soon quickly lose interest in auto repairs and end up as a failed singer because he has not been trained on how to harness his potential.


I have said so much about talent without education; let me briefly say something about education without talent. Many young Nigerian ladies and men are not employed today because they were wrong in their approach and perspective to education. Many graduates all over the world have the clear vision of graduating from school with good grades, find a job in a nice company with a fat check and live like kings and queens for the rest of their lives. This is the common belief and mentality but it is a fatal error! School is not necessarily meant for you to get a job after graduation, it is meant to train you how to be employable and how to think of creating jobs yourself. This country today is full of graduates who are useless unless they are employed by someone else. But by themselves, they are useless.


There are many people in the world today that the world will never forget in a hurry. These people had left a permanent mark on the fine silk of time; they have carved a niche for themselves in their fields. They are immortal. People like Michael Jackson, Isaac Newton, Abraham Lincoln, mother Theresa and so on. These people have combined education (whether formal or otherwise) with their talents and made themselves unforgettable. So talent and education go together, a talented singer who lacks musical education will most likely end up as a failed singer. A talented footballer who doesn’t understand the rules of the game will spend much time on the bench than on the pitch.

From Your loving Father.
How then can someone know what his or her talent is?

The answer to this question is very simple. Whatever you feel so happy doing is your talent. Rose, if you wake up in the morning and feel like singing nonstop, then that is your talent! Knowing what your talent is takes careful examination of yourself. But talent is always there at the sub surface level, yearning and begging to be set free. It is like a beautiful flower, covered with a bushel; its beauty hidden to the world. Rose, I believe that with all that I have said in this letter, you will start working on discovering your talent? And when you eventually discover whatever it is, I hope that you will be diligent enough to nurture it to maturity because a newly discovered talent is like a new born baby. It is exposed to starvation, exposure, diseases and problems, it is now the responsibility of the mother to protect it from all these problems. Your talent is the new born baby and you are its mother, you must nurture it and bring it to maturity and this will only happen if you are constantly working on and improving your talent.


Knowing what your talent is is not enough; working constantly at it is what makes it worthwhile. Nobody wants to know that you are an exceptional writer if you don’t write new things constantly. No one cares that you are gifted in inventing new things if you don’t bring up new ideas regularly. Consistency is what makes talent to be perfect and noticeable.


Rose, I already know what your talent is but I won’t tell you. I want you to find it yourself. I raised you since you were a baby and I know what makes you happy and what gets you angry. I know the things that you love..... https://heavenoasis..com/2019/08/letter-to-my-daughter.html