JC - Technology and Stuff

I am reading a book at work at present entitled ‘Now, Discover Your Strengths‘ and one of its claims to fame is that it contains a link to an online strengths test you can take. The idea is that via a series of questions it will tell you what you are good at in order to help you become a better person. Anyway, here are the results it gave me. You can read into them whatever you want!

JOHN COX
Your Signature Themes

Many years of research conducted by The Gallup Organization suggest that
the most effective people are those who understand their strengths and
behaviors. These people are best able to develop strategies to meet and
exceed the demands of their daily lives, their careers, and their families.

A review of the knowledge and skills you have acquired can provide a
basic sense of your abilities, but an awareness and understanding of
your natural talents will provide true insight into the core reasons
behind your consistent successes.

Your Signature Themes report presents your five most dominant themes of
talent, in the rank order revealed by your responses to StrengthsFinder.
Of the 34 themes measured, these are your “top five.”

Your Signature Themes are very important in maximizing the talents that
lead to your successes. By focusing on your Signature Themes, separately
and in combination, you can identify your talents, build them into
strengths, and enjoy personal and career success through consistent,
near-perfect performance.

Maximizer

Excellence, not average, is your measure. Taking something from below
average to slightly above average takes a great deal of effort and in
your opinion is not very rewarding. Transforming something strong into
something superb takes just as much effort but is much more thrilling.
Strengths, whether yours or someone else’s, fascinate you. Like a diver
after pearls, you search them out, watching for the telltale signs of a
strength. A glimpse of untutored excellence, rapid learning, a skill
mastered without recourse to steps—all these are clues that a strength
may be in play. And having found a strength, you feel compelled to
nurture it, refine it, and stretch it toward excellence. You polish the
pearl until it shines. This natural sorting of strengths means that
others see you as discriminating. You choose to spend time with people
who appreciate your particular strengths. Likewise, you are attracted to
others who seem to have found and cultivated their own strengths. You
tend to avoid those who want to fix you and make you well rounded. You
don’t want to spend your life bemoaning what you lack. Rather, you want
to capitalize on the gifts with which you are blessed. It’s more fun.
It’s more productive. And, counterintuitively, it is more demanding.

Activator

“When can we start?” This is a recurring question in your life. You are
impatient for action. You may concede that analysis has its uses or that
debate and discussion can occasionally yield some valuable insights, but
deep down you know that only action is real. Only action can make things
happen. Only action leads to performance. Once a decision is made, you
cannot not act. Others may worry that “there are still some things we
don’t know,” but this doesn’t seem to slow you. If the decision has been
made to go across town, you know that the fastest way to get there is to
go stoplight to stoplight. You are not going to sit around waiting until
all the lights have turned green. Besides, in your view, action and
thinking are not opposites. In fact, guided by your Activator theme, you
believe that action is the best device for learning. You make a
decision, you take action, you look at the result, and you learn. This
learning informs your next action and your next. How can you grow if you
have nothing to react to? Well, you believe you can’t. You must put
yourself out there. You must take the next step. It is the only way to
keep your thinking fresh and informed. The bottom line is this: You know
you will be judged not by what you say, not by what you think, but by
what you get done. This does not frighten you. It pleases you.

Input

You are inquisitive. You collect things. You might collect
information—words, facts, books, and quotations—or you might collect
tangible objects such as butterflies, baseball cards, porcelain dolls,
or sepia photographs. Whatever you collect, you collect it because it
interests you. And yours is the kind of mind that finds so many things
interesting. The world is exciting precisely because of its infinite
variety and complexity. If you read a great deal, it is not necessarily
to refine your theories but, rather, to add more information to your
archives. If you like to travel, it is because each new location offers
novel artifacts and facts. These can be acquired and then stored away.
Why are they worth storing? At the time of storing it is often hard to
say exactly when or why you might need them, but who knows when they
might become useful? With all those possible uses in mind, you really
don’t feel comfortable throwing anything away. So you keep acquiring and
compiling and filing stuff away. It’s interesting. It keeps your mind
fresh. And perhaps one day some of it will prove valuable.

Futuristic

“Wouldn’t it be great if . . .” You are the kind of person who loves to
peer over the horizon. The future fascinates you. As if it were
projected on the wall, you see in detail what the future might hold, and
this detailed picture keeps pulling you forward, into tomorrow. While
the exact content of the picture will depend on your other strengths and
interests—a better product, a better team, a better life, or a better
world—it will always be inspirational to you. You are a dreamer who sees
visions of what could be and who cherishes those visions. When the
present proves too frustrating and the people around you too pragmatic,
you conjure up your visions of the future and they energize you. They
can energize others, too. In fact, very often people look to you to
describe your visions of the future. They want a picture that can raise
their sights and thereby their spirits. You can paint it for them.
Practice. Choose your words carefully. Make the picture as vivid as
possible. People will want to latch on to the hope you bring.

Focus

“Where am I headed?” you ask yourself. You ask this question every day.
Guided by this theme of Focus, you need a clear destination. Lacking
one, your life and your work can quickly become frustrating. And so each
year, each month, and even each week you set goals. These goals then
serve as your compass, helping you determine priorities and make the
necessary corrections to get back on course. Your Focus is powerful
because it forces you to filter; you instinctively evaluate whether or
not a particular action will help you move toward your goal. Those that
don’t are ignored. In the end, then, your Focus forces you to be
efficient. Naturally, the flip side of this is that it causes you to
become impatient with delays, obstacles, and even tangents, no matter
how intriguing they appear to be. This makes you an extremely valuable
team member. When others start to wander down other avenues, you bring
them back to the main road. Your Focus reminds everyone that if
something is not helping you move toward your destination, then it is
not important. And if it is not important, then it is not worth your
time. You keep everyone on point.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 9th, 2008 at 4:30 pm and is filed under Stuff. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.