SMARTS
Are We Hardwired For Success?
Editorial Review
You may consider yourself to be an organized person, or a procrastinator, or sometimes forgetful. May be you see yourself as someone who gets things done, highly flexible, cool under pressure, or good at managing time. Although you might be accurate in some of your self-assessment, there has been no way to precisely define each of these attributes, or to show their relationship to each other. These are actually brain functions or cognitive skills that neuroscientists have located in specific regions of the brain; primarily the frontal lobes. These functions develop starting at birth and they are hardwired into every individual. Brain researchers have found that these skills are fully developed by the time you become an adult. These skills are called “Executive Skills” because they help you “execute” tasks. Executive skills help you make decisions about what you should focus on, both what’s worth dealing with and what should be ignored, and they help independently manage your own behavior. They temper and adjust your emotions, help you review and modify your actions, and fine-tune your response as you move from one issue or activity to the next.
Book Reviews
Books on Related Topics
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Wisdom to Share
When dealing with your strengths and weaknesses, you can be realistic about what you might be able to accomplish.
Thus, awareness helps a lot since it will enable you to connect with your colleague with opposite strengths and weaknesses and begin to complement each other.
It’s common for a person with certain strengths to become frustrated with someone with corresponding weaknesses.
It could be that you clearly see that the next step or promotion after the temporary position plays to your strength. In this case, you will have to minimize the impact of your weakness until you get that promotion.
Conversely, a task is “effortful” when it requires skills that are your weakest Executive Skills. The task is still doable, but at a higher amount of effort and difficulty. It is also not the best positioning for your long term since you should be trying to play your strengths in Executive Skills.
At the least, knowing your own combination can show you how much work you will feel like doing when dealing with certain tasks.
Thus, determining your strongest and weakest skills requires that you understand each of the skills and characteristics associated with them.
Everyone has strengths and everyone has weaknesses in their skills. It would be extremely unusual for a person to be strong in all twelve skills, since some are effectively opposites.
In direct contrast to most management advice books, I find that attacking the easier tasks first creates a more efficient work day. Eliminating the small allows me to focus exclusively on the big tasks.
Books by the same Author
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