The secret to happiness is to use your gifts. That’s according to What Color Is Your Parachute? author Dick Bolles. Your gifts have a kind of energy, Dick says, and if you don’t let that out you’ll go crazy.

Dick spent a lot of time in the workshop I attended talking about gifts. He had us write seven stories about things we’d done that we felt really, really good about. Then he put us in groups of three, and had us pick those stories apart. We decided what skills we most loved to use and where we’d most love to use them.

One night the guy sitting next to me wanted to know what my dream job was. I couldn’t even say it out loud, it seemed so out of reach. I just scribbled r-a-d-i-o in his notebook. “Oh you’d be perfect for radio!” he exclaimed, and then told me why.

Until the workshop I’d never thought of myself as a person with gifts. I mean, who does? Yet here we were, on what felt like a Christmas morning that lasted two whole weeks, unwrapping those gifts and comparing notes: “What do you think of this one? I’m going to love using this…”

Being with Dick is like gazing at the Manhattan skyline from the Staten Island Ferry. Everything else just sort of falls away, except for this. Are you doing what you came here to do, or not? Are you using your gifts, or not?