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by Tom Rath

Success often requires playing to your strengths. But do you really know you’re your strengths are and how to capitalize on them?

StrengthsFinder 2.0 has the answer.

Author Tom Rath has spent his career studying strengths and why people should make the most of them instead of focusing on their shortcomings. His research has identified 34 most common talents (he calls them themes) and created a tool for determining anyone’s top five. Rath believes that discovering your primary talents will have great benefit to you and your work peers.

Each StrengthsFinder 2.0 book includes an access code that allows the reader to take a 45-minute online test to determine his or her strengths. The book includes detailed information on each of the themes, such as Analytical, Focus, Maximizer, and Strategic. It also includes ideas for action and working with others who exhibit that particular strength.

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http://ocw.mit.edc/

MIT’s Open Courseware project is Good Will Hunting without the janitor job. The website allows anyone to review materials, and sometimes lecture video, from 1,800 MIT courses. The cost: free. The subjects range from biology to economics to nuclear science. With each course, users can review the syllabus, lecture notes, class/individual project assignments, and additional readings.

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What Got You Here Won’t Get You There by Marshall Goldsmith

The difference between being very good and great is often a few degrees of change rather than a quantum leap.

Executive coach Marshall Goldsmith explores how subtle nuances make all the difference in the business world, especially transitioning from upper management to the executive level. These same nuances can impact relationships outside the workplace, such as in marriage or parenting.

Goldsmith is candid in outlining 20 interpersonal challenges that keep talented people from reaching the top. These behaviors, or “transactional flaws,” lead to negative perceptions that can hold back any executive.

1.  The need to win at all costs
2. Having to add our two cents to every discussion
3. Passing judgment
4. Making destructive comments
5. Overusing negative qualifiers: no, but, and however
6. The need to show people we’re smarter than they think we are
7. Speaking when angry
8. Negativity
9. Withholding information
10. Inability to give praise or recognition
11. Claiming credit that we don’t deserve
12. Making excuses
13. Clinging to the past
14. Playing favorites
15. Refusing to express regret
16. Not listening
17. Failing to express gratitude
18. Punishing the messenger
19. Passing the buck
20. Exalting failures as virtues because they’re who we are

Unfortunately, Goldsmith finds most high achievers are disillusioned into thinking that their success is attributed to these bad behaviors. Therefore, they resist change.

Goldsmith’s remedy for these behaviors is simple: stop doing them. His solution for making the necessary changes is to gather feedback from appropriate colleagues and cohorts, determine which behaviors to change, apologize, advertise, listen, thank, and follow up, and practice feed-forward.

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Abraham Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs and Frederick Herzberg’s Motivational Maintenance Model offer a key insight about career satisfaction.

Both theories contend that higher needs come into focus only after the lower needs have been met and that the journey of personal fulfillment increases in importance as one achieves greater levels of success.

For example, a starving man is so fixated on food that safety and security aren’t important to him. In the same way, many people become so preoccupied with salary, benefits or other factors when selecting a career that they fail to consider whether the work will ever satisfy higher needs.

Work that is not inspiring to a person will never satisfy him or her. New complaints will be constant because the person’s ladder is against the wrong wall.

The lesson: a sustainable and advancing career path ultimately comes down to whether an individual is happy with the work in and of itself.

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A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future by Daniel Pink

Author Dan Pink makes a convincing case for a new way of looking at the world that leans more toward right-brained (intuitive) thinking as opposed to left-brained (logic).

The information age and the knowledge workers jobs that it created relies heavily on the left brain. Pink believes that macro factors – most notably abundance of materials goods and information, the rise of knowledge workers in Asia, and automation – are creating a new conceptual age that demands new thinking.

The following are Pink’s six key thinking skills for the new conceptual age:

1. Design — Function and form are crucial for success. See Apple vs. Microsoft.
2. Story — With Google, everybody has information on demand at their fingertips. Being able to tell good stories creates context and makes information more memorable.
3. Symphony — The ability to think holistically (right-brained) as opposed to linearly (left-brained) is necessary to manage information and relationships in an increasingly complex world.
4. Empathy — Deep relationships built on mutual understanding rather than transaction are becoming the norm.
5. Play — Enjoyment has practical applications in terms of learning new skills but also healing powers for the stress everyone feels every day.
6. Meaning — Having a purpose in life is becoming increasingly as important as what you accumulate in life.

After explaining each skill, Pink provides a portfolio of suggested activities, such as attending a storytelling festival to learn about storytelling, to develop each skill.

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