What is an anti-talent?

The only clear way to define an anti-talent is through comparison to a talent.

A talent is an ability or area in our life that comes easily and that we are capable of becoming superior at. Tasks that use our talents (also called strengths or gifts) come easily to us. We can learn to become better at them quickly, and if we devote effort to them, we can become among the top 5% at perfoming them. Often when we are working at a task within our talent, things just "work out," almost like magic. This is true even when we may not have a lot of education, experience or training.

An antitalent is exactly the opposite. These are areas of skill or ability that we have little or no natural affinity for. We can improve in these areas, but never really become excellent at them. If it is a true antitalent, and not just a weakness, when we try to accomplish tasks within our area of antitalent, things will often go wrong in unexpected or even unlikely ways. Needless to say, trying to work in an area of anti-talents can be discouraging!

My experience with the shower is an excellent example. For even a person with average talent in home repair, the changing of two washers would be a simple task, especially if it was a task that (as in my case) had been done several times before. Because for me home repair is an antitalent, unlikely (and to me, inexplicable) things went wrong, to the point of making a ten-minute job stretch out to 2.5 hours.

The best way to understand this is to imagine a bell curve. Each of us is given a certain amount of natural ability in various areas. Most of us have an average amount of natural ability in most areas, but we have one or more areas where we are talented - we have exceptional ability in those. But it makes sense that if there are areas that we have exceptional amounts of ability(represented by the high end of the bell curve) there could also be places where we are at the low end of the bell curve. These are antitalents.