Ok, so practically everyone you talk to about this will give you very vague answers that, really, aren't terribly helpful. I will do the opposite.
Firstly, don't expect to understand this topic overnight. It's likley that you're going to have to learn a whole new way of thinking--one that will benefit you for the rest of your life--before you can understand the area you're trying to fathom.
My recommendation would be to read
Now, Discover Your Strengths. That book will give you a base understanding about strengths and talents, and give you a language you can use to describe them (i.e. the various "talent themes" mentioned in the book). As for discovering your talents... when I have a good resource I can highly recommend, I'll start doing so.
There's nothing scary about not being able to change your talents; in fact, it'd probably be scarier if you
could change your talents, since, well, read
Now, Discover Your Strengths and that will become clear.
Oh and the research shows that it's around the age of 16 where your talents--the synaptic connections in your brain--stop changing significantly and start becoming less "malleable" (figuratively speaking). (Source: Book,
Go Put Your Strengths To Work.)
The book,
The One Thing You Need to Know has a section on the biology of synapses and talent, but it doesn't go into as much detail as I would have liked it to and still leaves some things unexplained. Here's a super-nice
summary of The One Thing... (that in no way acts as a replacement for the book, since it doesn't include all the detail that is usually needed to make people even consider this type of thinking, since other, less useful thinking is predominant).
My advice to you is to throw away any vague definition you use for and start becoming very specific and clear. Most people throw around words like "talent" like candy, without having the slightest clue as to what it really means. A key technique I use to find people who are speaking, but not really speaking (which happens when you use words that you don't really understand the meaning of) is to ask people to define a word they just used. E.g. If someone says, "That was a great presentation. You have great talent" I'd ask them to define "talent" to find out what they really mean, since "talent" (when most people use it) tells me nothing. It's sort of a blank filler word that anesthetises your brain.
You'd also do well to read the following article, since it teaches *great* lessons on thinking with clarity and actually being effective. It's helped me become a much better writer and speaker. On the downside, virutally nobody else thinks clearly, so communicating with people who aren't very specific and clear (even people you'd call "intelligent" don't do it... and yep, if I were you, I'd be asking me to define "intelligent"
) becomes a bit of a chore since, in general, people use English to reflect their thinking (which is often very unclear and subjective, and more about emotion than words that accurately represent their emotion) instead of carefully choosing words that have definitions that match what they're feeling and then using English as a language as it's intended to be used (and yes, I butchered that explanation, but it's a pretty hard concept to explain... very abstract; I need more practice).
But yeah, the link:
Sirlin.net — Writing Well, Part 2: Clear Thinking, Clear Writing Another tip: if you think you understand something, try to write about it. To the degree that you can express it concisely and effectively is the degree you understand it. You may have an intuitive, subconscious grasp of something, but that won't help when you're communicating with people unless they have similar experience to you.
Final tip: if you want to know more about talent and strengths, search for "talent" and "strengths" and "strength" using an
advanced search using my name ("Bruce Achterberg"). You'll further your education about strengths, since I've written a fair bit about them and linked to some nice sites.
Boy, I just can't stop giving tips: I'm going to be posting some links to various resources I find useful in my Twitter account (
Twitter / bruceachterberg), so feel free to check that out. I'll make a special effort to posts some links about talent, since virtually no one truly understands it (I've researched and studied it in both life and other sources... lots).