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WEEKLY BOOK REVIEW
Now, Discover Your Strengths [by James Fant] This career book offers insight into how we need to play up our strengths to find success and happiness in our careers. But what did our reviewer think of its message?
A senior executive at Merrill Lynch once explained his favorite interview technique to an associate of mine. Like many interviewers, he would ask candidates about “their greatest professional accomplishment.” The hapless candidate would then explain, usually with a proud smile, how he or she had managed to pull off a great coup against all odds, and with great toil and trouble. This director would then ensure that the candidate was not offered a job that had anything to do with that accomplishment. His reasoning went something like this: if you are proud of a particular accomplishment, that means you probably worked hard at it. And if you worked hard at it -- to master a new skill, for instance, or perhaps to overcome a previous fear or perceived shortcoming -- then the accomplishment, in his view, did not come naturally to you. Had it done so, this victory against all odds would not have seemed a coup: merely par for the course. And if something does not come naturally to you, he does not want you to do it under his watch. QED. This may seem like an unfair, even perverse, way to interview someone and frankly I am not able to do it justice here. I am not sure it is even “just.” But there is, implicit in his hiring philosophy, a truth - which is that you tend to be better at some things than others, and that you tend to enjoy what you are naturally good at. And vice versa. You therefore ignore your characteristic strengths and weaknesses at your peril, and so, he thinks, does your employer. Marcus Buckingham and Donald Clifton, the authors of Now, Discover Your Strengths, want people to understand their strengths so that they can be happier, more fulfilled, and more successful. They argue, sensibly, PAGE 1
that you need to know what you’re good at in order to reap the fruits of your strengths. As in the biblical parable of the talents, it is our job is to make the most of what we are given. Instead of lamenting our weaknesses, and spending time and effort trying to repair them, a peculiar obsession of our culture, and perhaps a cultural legacy of Puritanism, we should take stock of what we’re good at and make the most of it. Most people, apparently, do not. Strengths are not knowledge, nor are they the product of training. They are abilities, or clusters of abilities - and generic ones at that. You will not find writing briefs, preparing witnesses, or negotiating complex transactions on the authors’ inventory of strengths. Instead, you will find designations like “achiever, competition, developer, learner,” and thirty others (the lack of parallelism is the authors’ own). Once you take the “Strengthsfinder Profile,” a web-based survey that you are entitled to access after purchasing the book (there is a code printed inside), you are duly informed of your top five strengths. It is a relative ranking. The book then describes each “strength” in greater detail. Understanding your strengths and how to apply them to your legal career is left to you. The authors are arguably part of a loose movement that has been termed “positive psychology,” which was originally conceived, and is still led, by Dr. Martin Seligman of the University of Pennsylvania (he has his own “strengths” test, available for free on the Internet at www.authentichappiness. org). Positive psychology is predicated on the (seemingly indisputable) notion that most psychologists tend to fixate on pathology. But
many people, who do not suffer from a recognizable mental illness, still have an inchoate sense that their life could be happier or better in some ineffable way if they only knew how to make it so. Based on my own observation, I would estimate that a large majority of attorneys fall into this category. Seligman believes these people deserve help, too. And so, implicitly, do the authors of this book. To many, the authors’ contention that strengths are relatively fixed and therefore somewhat immutable from an early age will seem a heresy. The prevailing wisdom of the last several decades, at least in academic, sociological and anthropological circles, is that we are all, essentially, plastic beings. We can be molded to do anything, and to be “good” at anything. A corollary of this notion is that we can therefore improve anything, if only we try hard enough, or muster enough willpower to overcome our deficiencies. This is the “can do” spirit in a nutshell, nearly as old as America itself. Give it the old college try. Learn to earn. And so on. Although some scholars (cf., Steven Pinker) have recently challenged the notion that we are blank slates, tabula rasa, for our purposes here the nature/nurture question is an academic one. Whether prompted by nature or nurture, or some mysterious combination thereof, we can all agree with the authors that we have individual strengths. In order to find happiness and fulfillment, and perhaps even a modicum of success, the authors argue that we need only “discover” and deploy these strengths more effectively. One of the underlying strengths of this book is the large body of empirical data that Gallup has collected over the years that apparently supports the authors’ thesis. While continued on back