Want to know your natural talents?

Did you know that years of research have found that only 17% of people within the workplace play to their strengths most of the time? This means most of the companies (and people!) are operating much below their potential. For everyone’s sake this number needs to be higher.

I've been reading "Now, discover your strenghts" and this is a book I recommend to everyone. To begin, the authors posit that businesses (and personalities) are built on two faulty assumptions:

• Each person can learn to be competent in almost anything.
• Each person's greatest room for growth is in his or her areas of greatest weakness

This faulty paradigm means that people get promoted for wrong reasons, trained in wrong things (which they lack talent for and which makes it useless, a waste of time and money in the end), companies expect wrong things from people (which stop them from exceling) and people commit their life to improving their weaknesses and don't get very far.

Working with data gathered by Gallup, who conducted interviews with over 2 million people, the authors present the reader with thirty-four basic "themes", or strengths. There are hundreds of combinations of these individual strengths, and in order to find out what your 'combination of strengths' is requires you to take a test on their website. When you buy the book, you are given a password and a URL.

The test is serious, extensive, and comprehensive. It isn't short, it takes a commitment from you, but I also think the rewards are significant. I took the test and I think the results reflect accurately who I am. Think about it. Self-knowledge is often hard to come by.

You will get to know your top 5 talents (recurring patterns of thought, feeling or behavior that can be productively applied), how to work with your strenghts and perhaps you can revise your life.