Donald O. Clifton

“At an early age, you started hearing it: It's a virtue to be "well-rounded."... They might as well have said : Become as dull as you possibly can be.”

“The 'big five' factors of personality are neuroticism (which reflects emotional stability), extroversion (seeking the company of others), openness (interest in new experiences, ideas, and so forth), agreeableness (likability, harmoniousness), and conscientiousness (rule abidance, discipline, integrity).”

“Positive psychology is a framework, or a paradigm, that encompasses an approach to psychology from the perspective of healthy, successful life functioning.”

“Lastly, since the greatest room for each person's growth lies in his areas of greatest strength, you should devise ways to help each person grow his career without necessarily promoting him up the corporate ladder and out of his areas of strength. In this organization 'promotion' will mean finding ways to give prestige, respect, and financial reward to anyone who has achieved word-class performance in any role, no matter where that role is in the hierarchy. By doing so you will overcome the remaining two obstacles to building a strengths-based organization: the 'even though I'm now in the wrong role, it was the only way to grow my career' problem and the 'I'm in a pass-through role that no one respects' problem.”

“Since the greatest room for each person's growth is in the areas of his greatest strength, you should focus your training time and money on educating him about his strengths and figuring out ways to build on these strengths rather than on remedially trying to plug his 'skill gaps.' You will find that this one shift in emphasis will pay huge dividends. In one fell swoop you will sidestep three potential pitfalls to building a strengths-based organization: the 'I don't have the skills and knowledge I need' problem, the 'I don't know what I'm best at' problem, and the 'my manager doesn't know what I'm best at' problem.”

“Since each person's talents are enduring, you should spend a great deal of time and money selecting people properly in the first place. This will help mitigate the 'I don't think I have the right talent for the role' problem.Since each person's talents are unique, you should focus performance by legislating outcomes rather than forcing each person into a stylistic mold. This means a strong emphasis on careful measurement of the right outcomes, and less on policies, procedures, and competencies. This will address the 'in my role I don't have any room to express my talents' problem.”

“Our research into human strengths does not support the extreme, and extremely misleading, assertion that 'you can play any role you set your mind to,' but it does lead us to this truth: Whatever you set your mind to, you will be most successful when you craft your role to play to your signature talents most of the time.”

“Each of these strategies-get a little better at it, design a support system, use one of your strongest themes to overwhelm your weakness, find a partner, and just stop doing it-can help you as you strive to build your life around your strengths.”

“But not unlike the gremlins in the film of the same name who were transformed into nasty little critters if they were splashed or if they were fed after midnight, irrelevant nontalents can mutate into real weaknesses under one condition: As soon as you find yourself in a role that requires you to play to one of your nontalents-or area of low skills or knowledge-a weakness is born.”

“Our definition of a weakness is anything that gets in the way of excellent performance.”

“Such questions are labeled 'ipsative,' which means that if in reality you have both, the question makes it impossible for you to show up with both.”

“We live with them every day, and they come so easily to us that they cease to be precious.”

“If your senses are numbed with delusion and denial, you will stop looking for these true strengths and wind up living a second-rate version of someone's life rather than a worldclass version of your own”

“As the wit W. C. Fields advised: 'If at first you don't succeed, try again. Then quit. There is no point making a fool of yourself.'This advice is easy to give and difficult to put into practice, but as you build your strengths, sometimes making great progress, sometimes slipping back, take comfort from the fact that this is how a strong life is supposed to be lived.”

“From this point of view, to avoid your strengths and to focus on your weaknesses isn't a sign of diligent humility. It is almost irresponsible. By contrast the most responsible, the most challenging, and, in the sense of being true to yourself, the most honorable thing to do is face up to the strength potential inherent in your talents and then find ways to realize it.”

“Well, more than likely you will never entirely dissolve either your fear of your own failure or your small pleasure in other people's.”

“Back in the 1930s, Carl Jung, the eminent thinker and psychologist, put it this way: Criticism has 'the power to do good when there is something that must be destroyed, dissolved or reduced, but [it is] capable only of harm when there is something to be built.”

“In Martin Seligman's words, 'Psychology is half-baked, literally half-baked. We have baked the part about mental illness. We have baked the part about repair and damage. But the other side is unbaked. The side of strengths, the side of what we are good at, the side…of what makes life worth living.”

“The only possible failure would be never managing to find the right role or the right partners to help you realize that strength.”

“But if you find yourself thinking in the future, if you find yourself actually anticipating the activity-'When can I do this again?'-it is a pretty good sign that you are enjoying it and that one of your talents is in play.”

“Satisfactions provide the last clue to talent. As we described in the previous chapter, your strongest synaptic connections are designed so that when you use them, it feels good. Thus, obviously, if it feels good when you perform an activity, chances are that you are using a talent.”

“Rapid learning offers another trace of talent. Sometimes a talent doesn't signal itself through yearning. For a myriad of reasons, although the talent exists within you, you don't hear its call. Instead, comparatively late in life, something sparks the talent, and it is the speed at which you learn a new skill that provides the telltale clue to the talent's presence and power.”

“While your spontaneous reactions provide the clearest trace of your talents, here are three more clues to keep in mind: yearnings, rapid learning, and satisfactions. Yearnings reveal the presence of a talent, particularly when they are felt early in life.”

“The point here is not that you should always forgo this kind of weakness fixing. The point is that you should see it for what it is: damage control, not development. And as we mentioned earlier, damage control can prevent failure, but it will never elevate you to excellence.”

“As John Bruer describes in The Myth of the First Three Years, nature has developed three ways for you to learn as an adult: Continue to strengthen your existing synaptic connections (as happens when you perfect a talent with relevant skills and knowledge), keep losing more of your extraneous connections (as also happens when you focus on your talents and allow other connections to deteriorate), or develop a few more synaptic connections.”

“The boundaries of human experience are finite (if you haven't experienced emotions such as pain or fear or shame, you are either a sociopath or an alien), but within these boundaries there is significant range and diversity.”

“If nature didn't whittle down your network to a smaller number of strongly forged connections, you would never become an adult. You would remain a permanent child, frozen in sensory overload.”

“Rather, your smartness and your effectiveness depend on how well you capitalize on your strongest connections.”

“Talent is any recurring pattern of thought, feeling, or behavior that can be productively applied.”

“The bottom line on skills is this: A skill is designed to make the secrets of the best easily transferable. If you learn a skill, it will help you get a little better, but it will not cover for a lack of talent. Instead, as you build your strengths, skills will actually prove most valuable when they are combined with genuine talent.”

“The second flaw is that some activities, almost by definition, defy being broken down into steps.”

“Skills are so enticingly helpful that they obscure their two flaws. The first flaw is that while skills will help you perform, they will not help you excel.”

“Thus, the lesson we should draw from these people is not that each person's talents are infinitely malleable or that they can be anything they want to be if they just apply themselves. Rather, the lesson is that talents, like intelligence, are value neutral. If you want to change your life so that others may benefit from your strengths, then change your values. Don't waste time trying to change your talents.”

“There is one sure way to identify your greatest potential for strength: Step back and watch yourself for a while. Try an activity and see how quickly you pick it up, how quickly you skip steps in the learning and add twists and kinks you haven't been taught yet. See whether you become absorbed in the activity to such an extent that you lose track of time. If none of these has happened after a couple of months, try another activity and watch-and another. Over time your dominant talents will reveal themselves, and you can start to refine them into a powerful strength.”

“Knowledge consists of the facts and lessons learned.Skills are the steps of an activity.These three-talents, knowledge, and skills-combine to create your strengths.”

“Talents are your naturally recurring patterns of thought, feeling, or behavior.”

“To develop a strength in any activity requires certain natural talents.”

“Third, you will excel only by maximizing your strengths, never by fixing your weaknesses. This is not the same as saying 'ignore your weaknesses.”

“When we studied them, excellent performers were rarely well rounded. On the contrary, they were sharp.”

“The acid test of a strength? The ability is a strength only if you can fathom yourself doing it repeatedly, happily, and successfully.”

“The definition of a strength that we will use throughout this book is quite specific: consistent near perfect performance in an activity.”

“First, he became aware of it. Many of us don't seem able to take even this step. Second, and most significant, he chose not to focus on reinforcing its weaker threads. Instead, he did the exact opposite: He identified its strongest threads, wove in education and experience, and built them into the dominating strengths we see today.”

“If there is any difference between you and me, it may simply be that I get up every day and have a chance to do what I love to do, every day.”

“1. Each person's talents are enduring and unique.2. Each person's greatest room for growth is in the areas of his or her greatest strength.”