I've been stuck by something that Marcus Buckingham said at the Leadership Summit.
"Only 12% of Americans are consistently working in their strengths" He also pointed out that America actually had the highest percentage of all the nations polled.
What he was saying was that most people spend most of their time and energy working to correct their weaknesses. If your child comes home with two A's a C and an F, what do you start working on? Right, you tell Dan to stop making sculptures and start working on his Spanish homework.
It's not just that we spend so much time trying to fix the problems (in my opinion) -I think we spend the vast majority of our time doing things that are not only not our strengths - but aren't necessarily our weaknesses either. We just do the stuff that we do.
We go through the motions. We check the boxes. We clock in and we show up.
So I looked at an "achiever" test that I took two years ago. I compared it to the strength finder test that I took two days ago. I asked the question, "what do you think my strengths are?" of my friends. (it's a little like asking, "why do you think I'm awesome?")
So now I'm trying to figure out:
-what are the things I'm great at?
-what are the things I'm passionate about?
-what is my "highest and best use"?
I took that last one from a smarty that wasn't a very good speaker - but said, "I don't build houses for poor people on the weekends....I don't work at soup kitchens, because that's not my highest and best use" - or something like that.
I see his point. Building houses and working at soup kitchens are great things...but what if you could design soup kitchens so that they were more efficient and ended up being better suited to feed more people? What if you were better at fund-raising and spent your spare time raising money for Habitat?
In the long run you'd have to agree that that's the smarter way to go.
I'm just wondering how to marry the three questions... A friend of mine often quotes (and here I'll screw up the quote) a line about how you spend your life: "your calling is where your deepest passion and the world's great needs collide" - or something like that.
So that's the question of the day...
"Only 12% of Americans are consistently working in their strengths" He also pointed out that America actually had the highest percentage of all the nations polled.
What he was saying was that most people spend most of their time and energy working to correct their weaknesses. If your child comes home with two A's a C and an F, what do you start working on? Right, you tell Dan to stop making sculptures and start working on his Spanish homework.
It's not just that we spend so much time trying to fix the problems (in my opinion) -I think we spend the vast majority of our time doing things that are not only not our strengths - but aren't necessarily our weaknesses either. We just do the stuff that we do.
We go through the motions. We check the boxes. We clock in and we show up.
So I looked at an "achiever" test that I took two years ago. I compared it to the strength finder test that I took two days ago. I asked the question, "what do you think my strengths are?" of my friends. (it's a little like asking, "why do you think I'm awesome?")
So now I'm trying to figure out:
-what are the things I'm great at?
-what are the things I'm passionate about?
-what is my "highest and best use"?
I took that last one from a smarty that wasn't a very good speaker - but said, "I don't build houses for poor people on the weekends....I don't work at soup kitchens, because that's not my highest and best use" - or something like that.
I see his point. Building houses and working at soup kitchens are great things...but what if you could design soup kitchens so that they were more efficient and ended up being better suited to feed more people? What if you were better at fund-raising and spent your spare time raising money for Habitat?
In the long run you'd have to agree that that's the smarter way to go.
I'm just wondering how to marry the three questions... A friend of mine often quotes (and here I'll screw up the quote) a line about how you spend your life: "your calling is where your deepest passion and the world's great needs collide" - or something like that.
So that's the question of the day...
"Discover Your STrengths" is a great book. Got me thinking strength rather than weakness and that does change your mental orientation... CBB
ReplyDeletei agree. it's also one of the themes of "Good to Great" if i remember correctly. i saw Markus Buckingham speak once too and he was one of the best that i saw then as well.
ReplyDelete