MANAGING ONESELF
What Are My Strengths
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 more people are wrong that right. And yet, a person can perform only from strength
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.
Dewey is often quoted as saying “You don’t learn from experience, you learn from reflecting on experience”. In Democracy and Education he touches on a similar point:
Such reflection upon experience gives rise to a distinction of what we experience (the experienced) and the experiencing—the how.
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 too disorderly for the good engineering mind. Human resources progessionals, by contrast, often pride themselves on their ignorance of elementary accounting or of quantitative methods altogether. But taking pride in such ignorance is self-defating. Go to work on acquiring the skills and knowledge you need to fully realize your strengths.
I’ve seen this several times in several places. Feels like a function of a hyper-specialized society. A topic for another day.