Over the years I have learned that I do well by focusing on what I do best. It took me a long time to learn this. Like many people, I spent years struggling to succeed by overcoming my numerous shortcomings - I prefer to begin things rather than to conclude them, I am not detail oriented, I have strong spatial pattern recognition but only average temporal pattern recognition and so on. Oh yes, I have terrible hand-efe coordination, but excellent balance and well beond average lung capacity. These days, I try to lead teams where other people make up for my weaknesses and I can concentrate on what I do best.
The first time I became aware of the philosophy that one should know what one does well and then do that was from management guru Peter Drucker (there is really no better word for this wonderful man). Drucker was a banker early in his life and then a journalist. He was not particularly successful at either profession and it was not until he honed in on the study of management that he was able to make a real contribution to human thought and activity. For much of his life Drucker kept a record of major decisions he had made and would review these decisions periodically to see what the outcomes had been. One of the decisions he repeatedly went back to and reinforced was the move from working in organizations to studying them.
This idea has been popularized in books by Marcus Buckingham and his colleagues, such as Now, Discover Your Strengths. The book is based on many years of research by Gallup which has developed a test instrument called Strengthsfinder to help people discover and understand their own strengths. I tend to be skeptical about such survey driven instruments, I have studied test design and generally find tests of this sort easy to game. But then, as the goal is to better understand myself, the only person who who would lose by gaming this system would be me! So I have used it several times in good faith, and I have also encouraged people who work with me and my family to use it give them a frame of reference for their own life decisions. And I have found it helps a great deal to get a bearing on ones own strengths and to understand those of the people around you.
On my last run through (I plan to do this again using the new version at some point this year) my strengths were as follows:
- Strategic
- Achievement
- Ideation
- Input
- Learning
These come as no surpise to people who know me.
I have been working to understand these strengths for several years now and have developed my own interpretations of what they mean to me.
Strategic: I look for patterns, long-term patterns, and the points in the pattern that have the potential for change.
Achievement: I am competitive and want to win. And I want what I win to have some significance, at least in my own eyes and for my immediate circle. Ideally, I want what I do to have some impact for the better.
Ideation: Ideas matter, generating them, sharing them, investigating them and seeing them become real.
Input: High bandwidth absorption and processing of large amounts of information, sorting them, and sending them back out. (How else to see larger patterns? Someone with different strengths might say through contemplation and deep thought.)
Learning: Well, I am trying to understand learning more deeply in this blog!
I have found these strengths apply pretty generally to how I live my life. Take cycling. Over the past few years I have become a hardcore urban commuter cyclist (through downtown Boston, up and down the Charles River for some extra distance, and over into Cambridge MA where I work). And I am working up to longer distances, I rode a century (160 KM) on my fixed gear last year and want to do a one-day ride of at least 200 KM (again on my fixie) this year. I am learning as much as I can about bicycles and cycling, from the design of the bike to the biophysics of performance and endurance (learning and input). I ride hard, don't like to be passed, and always try to go a bit longer and a bit harder (achievement). I plan my rides both daily and over the course of the year, trying to design rides that have a good rhythm and that explore the physical structure of Eastern Massachusetts (strategic). And I enjoy talking to my friends about their ideas and experiences of cycling and looking for better ways to hydrate or to build stamina and strength--interval training anyone?(ideation).
So over the course of this blog, I will be turning these strengths in on themselves, and using them to better understand how people learn, how it shapes their lives and communities, and how it contributes to a more connected society (connected into longer patterns of time and space, connected across cultures, and connections between people).
