How To Define These Strengths

Which activities created in you these specific sorts of experiences? People say I’m never satisfied, but I don’t think of it like that. I love taking something that’s working and then figuring out newer and better ways of doing things. I get bored so quickly. So if it’s new, never been done before, first time, I’m right there. I can’t tell you how many times we’ve redone our team awards, or our guest appreciation programs. I’ll never stop. So, no, your red threads won’t tell you in which particular job you will be successful. The conventional wisdom tells you that your past behavior is the best predictor of your future behavior. So, to help you identify your red threads, the trick is to identify your frequent patterns. And the best way to do this is to prompt yourself to think about a time, an instant, when something happened that made you feel a certain way. Try to answer each question instantaneously, off the top of your head, as it were. Don’t overthink it or intellectualize it.

Alone Again Or?

Just come up with the last time you felt each of these ten feelings. You might write down the date or the time, but more important, write down what you were doing. What you are looking for here are the patterns. I doubt you will list ten different activities. Instead, more than likely, you’ll find some overlap between your answers. Perhaps the last time you were singled out for praise was also the last time you lost track of time. Or maybe the last time you came up with a new way of doing things was also the last time you never wanted the activity to end. Once you identify these red threads, your challenge will be to weave them into the fabric of your life, both at home and at work. So, yes, love matters, but you don’t need to love all you do. You just need to find the love in what you do. On your journey, you’ll often bump into people who want to teach you new skills. And typically they’ll do this as though there is nothing already there inside you.

The Dream's Lost On Me

Before you arrive in the classroom or the training session, someone broke the skill down into steps and then applied a sequence to the steps. Then you are taught the steps and the sequence and encouraged to do deliberate practice in order to acquire the new skill. This approach works, sometimes, and is necessary, sometimes. But other times when you are introduced to a new skill, it will feel as if you’ve done it before. You don’t need the steps because you find yourself immediately able to do what you’re being asked to do. Ignorant of this, ignorant of you, the teacher puts the required steps in front of you in the belief that you need the steps in order to produce the performance. Of course, this doesn’t mean that you can’t get better with practice. It just means that along the way you will happen upon some activities that come so easily to you, it’s as if you’ve found a shortcut. You pick them up so fast, they feel so natural, that you don’t need the steps and the sequence and all those mechanics. You need just one exposure to the skill, and wham, you’re off to the races. This clicking may happen very early in life, or further along in your career. Hopefully, you’ll try many different activities and roles during the course of your life, but whatever you try, keep your feelings alert for when everything just clicks, when you pick up the new skill faster than you should.

Better Days

It’s a sign you’ve found love. Rapid learning and love, they’re linked. My hope for you is that you take your loves seriously. Because when you do, great things will happen for you. The first company I worked for, fresh out of college, was Gallup. You know it for the Gallup poll. Things like how engaged a certain person was at work, or which talents and strengths that person possessed. How the heck do you measure something as squishy as a person’s level of empathy, or ego, or assertiveness, or competitiveness? The challenge was not only how to define these strengths but, more importantly, how to measure them when the person didn’t even know if they had them or not. Clifton, who was Gallup’s chairman and chief scientist. There was nothing I wanted more than to be in that room with him. Because what he was doing was magic. He was figuring out which question should go with which answer to measure which strength. And he was a genius at it. The trick here was not to find the right answer. And then to prove, through stats, that this question did indeed predict how certain people would behave. I couldn’t wait to get into that room with him and pore over those stacks of printouts. I was told, though, that it was reserved for only the most senior scientists. That it would take years before I would be allowed in, and still more years before I would have learned enough of the skills of question/answer combo development to be allowed to participate. That day was what I held onto during those long winter nights after college when I was far from home, far from friends and London and all that was familiar to me, when I was questioning why the heck I had upped sticks and hightailed it to Lincoln, Nebraska. The day when I could sit with Don and work magic with questions and stats, that was my talisman. I didn’t care how long it took to learn the skills required. When that day finally came, it was a revelation. And it was the same with the wording of the question/answer combos. Why is Are you an overachiever or an underachiever? a great question, but Do you feel a need to achieve something every day? It’s virtually useless?