Succeeding Today

Build on Your Strengths and Forget about Your Weaknesses

Powerful Lessons from Strengths Finder 2.0.

If only you could improve on your areas of weakness, you would optimize your performance. Right? No. Wrong! And, if you work really hard, you can achieve anything you want. Right? No. Wrong.

Most conventional wisdom about optimizing our performance is dead wrong, according to Strengths Finder 2.0. Author, Tom Rath, builds on decades of research by the Gallup organization to prove his point. He states that we cannot change who we really are: “You cannot be anything you want to be—but you can be a lot more of who you already are.”

Don’t Take the Path of Most Resistance

The story of Rudy, the driven, but hapless Notre Dame football wannabe who got a few seconds of playing time after thousands of hours of relentless work illustrates Rath’s point. This heartwarming movie, offered a wrong-headed life lesson. Rather than figuring out where he could naturally excel, Rudy took the path of ‘most resistance.’

Unlike Rudy, we should take the path of least resistance. Rath stresses that we must determine those few things we do naturally well—and love to do—and then focus our energies at doing them brilliantly. We excel by turning our natural talents into strengths. Best of all, whenever we can play to those strengths most of the time, we will be both happy and successful.

Just as important–we should waste little time working on our weaknesses. At work, we are often presented with ‘areas of improvement’ and told to get good at what goes against our nature. Bad idea. Don’t try to fix the unfixable. Instead, optimize what we do easily and enthusiastically. That’s how we can deliver genuine value to our organizations.

Uncovering Your Strengths

Strengths Finder 2.0 offers a FREE online assessment from Gallup that enables you to determine your five core strengths (out of 34 Gallup identified) and how to put them to work. This is well worth the price of the book. And, if you’re a manager, you may want to encourage your staff to participate so that you can build on your individual strengths and excel as a team.