Where Do I Belong?

...most people, especially highly gifted people, do not really know where they belong until they are well past their mid-twenties.

A small number of people know very early where they belong.  Mathematicians, musicians, and cooks, for instance, are usually mathematicians, musicians, and cooks by the time they are four or five years old.  Physicians usually decide on their careers in their teens, if not earlier.  But most people, especially highly gifted people, do not really know where they belong until they are well past their mid-twenties.  By that time, however, they should know the answers to the three questions: What are my strengths?  How do I perform? and, What are my values?  And then they can and should decide where they belong.

Or rather, they should be able to decide where they do not belong.  The person who has learned that he or she does not perform well in a big organization should have learned to say to to a position in one.  The person who has learned that he or she is not a decision maker should have learned to say no to a decision making assignment.

Equally important, knowing the answer to these questions enables a person to say to an opportunity, an offer, or an assignment, "Yes, I will do that.  But this is the way I should be doing it.  This is the way it should be structured.  This is the way the relationships should be.  These are the kind of results you should expect from me and in this time frame, because this is who I am."

Successful careers are not planned.  They develop when people are prepared for opportunities because they know their strengths, their method of work, and their values.  Knowing where one belongs can transform an ordinary person--hardworking and competent but otherwise mediocre--into an outstanding performer.

ACTION POINT:  Understand your strengths, how you perform and your values to know where you belong.

Implications of Feedback Analysis

Go to work on acquiring the skills and knowledge you need to fully realize your strengths.

Several implications for action follow from feedback analysis.  First and foremost, concentrate on your strengths.  Put yourself where your strengths can produce results.

Second, work on improving your strengths.  Analysis will rapidly show where you need to improve skills or acquire new ones.  It will also show the gaps in your knowledge--and those can usually be filled.  Mathematicians are born, but everyone can learn trigonometry.

Third, discover where your intellectual arrogance is causing disabling ignorance and overcome it.  Far too many people--especially people with great expertise in one area--are contemptuous of knowledge in other areas or believe that being bright is a substitute for knowledge.  First-rate engineers, for instance tend to take pride in not knowing anything about people. Human beings, they believe, are much to disorderly for the good engineering mind.  Human resources professionals, by contrast, often pride themselves on their ignorance of elementary accounting or of quantitative methods altogether.  But taking pride in such ignorance is self-defeating.  Go to work on acquiring the skills and knowledge you need to fully realize your strengths.

ACTION POINT: Concentrate on your strengths, improve your strengths and abandon intellectual arrogance.

What Are My Strengths

...a person can perform only from strength.

Most people think they know what they are good at.  They are usually wrong.  More often, people know what they are not good at--and even the then more people are wrong than right.  And yet, a person can perform only from strength.  One cannot build performance on weaknesses, let alone on something one cannot do at all. 

Throughout history, people had little need to know their strengths.  A person was born into a position and a line of work:  The peasant's son would also be a peasant; the artisan's daughter, an artisan's wife; and so on.  but now people have choices.  We need to know our strengths in order to know where we belong.

The only way to discover your strengths is through feedback analysis.  Whenever you make a key decision or take a key action, write down what you expect will happen.  Nine or 12 months later, compare the actual results with your expectations.  

Practiced consistently, this simple method will show you within a fairly short period of time, maybe two or three years, where your strengths lie--and this is the most important thing to know.  The method will show you what you are doing or failing to do that deprives your of the full benefits of your strengths.  it will show you where you are not particularly competent.  And finally, it will show you where you have not strengths and cannot perform.

ACTION POINT: Write down your expected outcomes of key decisions and compare them to the actual results nine or 12 months later.