Talents play a bigger role in our life than we use to think.

For example, Maslow's hierarchy of needs makes us think that more basic needs have to be satisfied before the higher level ones. Indeed it's hard to focus on self-actualization and talents while you have nothing to eat or when you're in danger.

What people don't do often is treating problematic situations exactly as grounds for discovering new talents in themselves, as opportunities (and good reasons) for personal growth. If you've been unable to figure something out, but managed to dig really deep and apply new measure of diligence, finally discovering a solution that works will drastically change your life! Which will in turn give you a new method for dealing with reality, and if this new method is also applied diligently, another leap in quality will become more realistic!

This phenomenon is called emergence. After a certain quantity of units (equal or different in nature), a system consisting of them gets a new quality they didn't have on their own.

Having a real-world obstacle to stumble upon means that the problem you're facing is truly important for you, and options to mitigate that problem would be very helpful, fix your mood, and allow focusing on creativity and other enjoyable things. But we always forget to flip the chessboard and play our own game instead, while also solving the problem for real, because there are little to no examples of how to do it. Once you refuse to consider the problem absolute, you naturally start looking for practical solutions, and if you keep searching with enough diligence, you will find them.

Diligence here is probably the key.

First of all, the methods you should be practicing while figuring out the solution should be as diverse as possible. You need to cover the highest quantity of relevant aspects of the problem. You need to do research and understand the qualities of the problem.

The solution often boils down to something easily explainable, but finding it requires reassembling the puzzle in variety of ways and prioritizing the most helpful ones. Which means thinking outside the box and having... let's call it a fluid point of view: ability to control your virtual POV well enough to grasp how other people would genuinely see something from their POV. Not operating on impulse or by inertia, not following the lead, but watching how it works, and knowing the impulse and the inertia involved.

Second of all, if something looks like an obstacle for talents, it's not helpful to take it as is. Examples include reasons to give up, fears, harsh truth of all sorts, brutal honesty, fatalism, pessimism (often called realism), even danger and terror. You can trap your nightmare if you treat it as a perfect playground to learn new skills and discover new talents, and they will be ever more meaningful given the nature of the problem they're meant to solve.

The mindset that ignites all sorts of problems is Zero-sum game. Every time someone sees things in black and white like that, evil becomes absolute, good becomes either unreachable or inalienable, and one goes Vabanque regardless of how relevant that is. And usually it's not, and usually it's other people who have to pay the cost of someone's audacity. At some point one stops minding creating problems for others at all, and it's also when that person starts feeling irrational fear of vendetta and acts even more absurd to guarantee against it.

At that point, any possible talents that person had, mutate and get stuck at lackeying (and conservating) the very mindset of zero-sum game. New talents capable of solving problems stop appearing, reality degrades. Instead of paradigm shift, there happens paradigm break, and one agrees that evil is actually good, and good is actually evil.

Some people even thought that emergence can be forced upon human beings and lead to improvements in life, by destroying existing systems. But first, you have to honestly ask people before destroying something they've built (and be ready to retreat), and second, you need to actually understand how to build working systems in place of destroyed ones. Which involves all sorts of talents, and it is generally much more productive to first create a working replacement and only then demote the old version. And to be able to accomplish that, you need first-hand experience in iterative improvements of existing systems.

Third of all, proper research means ability to absorb all kinds of information, to expand your outlook indefinitely, without banning any kind of knowledge. After the fact, available info can be classified and assigned priorities, so effort is only spent on things that have the biggest urge and impact. That leaves room for the more delicate and subtle things that require less distraction.

Conscientiousness and purity of will are critical when organizing a playground for people, offering them directions they would be happy to follow, freely, whenever they are ready. Purity of will means not seeking your own pleasure, but seeking good because it's good. If one succeeds in that, that will lead to high level enjoyment that can't be imagined beforehand, and is also hard to explain after, but it gives meaning to the entire approach and inspires even more dedication.

To properly grasp reality, one needs to be able to remain fully silent (externally and internally) and to listen, to let people speak, and to let reality speak. Absolute silence shows reality in all its diversity and beauty, and the most important things become more apparent, as well as connections between them. Those connections are what makes emergence possible!

So to sum it up, it's a meaningful life goal to try to apply your current talents as diligently as possible, to discover and raise new ones, to embrace their relations, and to reach newer cycles of quality leaps, both in yourself and in the outside world.