Now Discover Your Strengths

Most people spend their lives trying to fix their weaknesses. The research says this is wrong. Based on a Gallup study of over 2 million people, Marcus Buckingham and Donald Clifton found that the people who are most successful, most engaged, and most fulfilled are those who spend the majority of their time doing things that play to their strengths - not patching holes in their game.

The StrengthsFinder assessment in this book gives you a language for what you're actually good at. Not what you think you should be good at. Not what your job description says. What you are actually wired for. That is the starting point. From there, the question is how to build your life and career around those strengths.

Based on a massive Gallup study of 2 million people, this book shows 1) individuals how to cultivate their own career strengths, 2) managers how to capitalize the talents of their people, and 3) executives how to build an entire organization around the talents of each employee. By the principal author of the national bestseller First, Break All the Rules.

"Most Americans do not know what their strengths are. When you ask them, they look at you with a blank stare, or they respond in terms of subject knowledge, which is the wrong answer." With this remark, Peter Drucker captured an enduring and unfortunate truth: most of us fail to build our lives around our strengths and talents. Instead, guided by our parents, by our teachers, by our managers and by psychology's fascination with pathology, we become experts in our weaknesses and spend our lives trying to paper over these cracks. Our talents remain in the background, like sundials in the shade.

This book will right our skewed perspective. It will throw light on each person's unique set of strengths and talents and show you how to focus and perfect these strengths. At the heart of the book is the StrengthsFinder Profile, the product of a twenty-five year, multimillion dollar effort to identify the most prevalent human talents. Gallup has conducted psychological profiles with over 2 million individuals - from the world's best teachers to the world's best hockey players, from great nurses to great insurance salespeople. From all these interviews emerged thirty-four distinct talents or "themes." This book introduces these thirty-four themes and, using the StrengthsFinder Profile, reveals which of the thirty-four represent your most dominant strengths.