Talents

What are you really good at? Some people are good with technology. Some are good at sports. Some are good listeners. Some are generous. Some have a knack for leading. Some just seem to be lucky. Some are very intuitive. Some, very analytical. Some make you want to listen when they speak. Some are hilarious. Some are beautiful. Some make you forget that the world isn’t always perfect.

So what are YOU good at? What are your talents?

A lot of research has been done recently by some very talented people who have focussed on the idea of strengths. Strengths are very similar to Talents; there are a few subtle differences which we may want to explore later, but for the purposes of this discussion they are essentially the same, so I highly recommend Marcus Buckingham’s “Now, Discover Your Strengths”, and Tom Rath’s “StrengthsFinder 2.0”. These tools expand upon the subject, and can help you analyse and identify your own strengths.

Marcus and Tom have led the revolution toward strength focussed development. The idea is that you get a lot more bang for your buck by investing in your strengths than you do by trying to “fix” your weaknesses. This makes a lot of sense. If you are already good at something you can develop this strength to become even better at it. On the other hand, if you completely suck at something, you can spend a lot of resources on it to improve only slightly, and you will end up sucking slightly less but still sucking.

There is one really good reason however, to attempt to improve weaknesses. This is in situations where there is a strong negative correlation between a weakness and purpose and/or values. We’ll be looking closer at this in a few pages when we summarize this series, but it is important to note it here in passing as there is a risk with a highly strength-based focus that your purpose may be critically hindered by ignoring all weaknesses.

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