I Have Witnessed the Future
Sunday, June 24, 2007 at 2:11PM I'm reading a book by Marcus Buckingham titled "Go. Put Your Strengths to Work." Unlike triathlon, you should be using your strengths to get things done at work and not worry about improving your weaknesses. Improving what you're bad at is a waste of time, the reasoning goes, because you will only be slightly less bad, but still bad at what you just spent a lot of time trying to improve.
Marcus encourages us to find out what we are good at and use it to our benefit. This made me ponder what I'm actually good at (not the run portion of a triathlon) and I finally came up with one certainty: One of my strengths is using technology to do things in a new way. We can go on and on with listing things like podcasting, using wattage for training, and geocaching, but my new favorite is collaborating with coworkers to get things done using Google Documents.
While my coworker, Kevin, and I attended a software conference in San Diego, we had a intuitive flash of brilliance. The whole building is stocked with WiFi and we are taking notes on the lectures to bring back to fellow employees in Texas, so why don't we write all of our notes in Google Documents and share them with each other?
For the rest of the week, Kevin and I had a blast writing our notes into documents on Google's servers. Everything was saved as we typed it, we could see each others' edits, and I would occasionally get a message from him that I was writing stuff that he had already written and to not bother. I even dropped my computer on it's power plug port at the end of the week, effectively taking the whole machine out of service. No worries - everything was saved online. I also can fine tune my notes at home and then publish them at work, without ever having to move them around via email or thumb drive.
This workflow performed so well, it was like something out of the future. Ubiquitous WiFi and server-based apps made my job much easier than ever before. Just this morning my wife was asking questions about what we will do without a computer while I get it fixed. I told her "This isn't like last time the laptop died (a few years ago). Our email, bill payment, all my work stuff, even the software I'm using to post to this blog, it's all online." Sure, there's a bunch of things loaded on that laptop, like my music, podcast production, and workout software that I can't use, but we will survive for a few days or weeks.
Back to the book I'm reading - Marcus says one of the identifiers of your strengths is that you enjoy doing it. You are so adept at it, it seems effortless. Remember when I said Kevin and I "had a blast" writing notes in Google Documents? That's how I know one of my strengths is adopting new technology to get work done.
What are some of your strengths?
Reader Comments (20)
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I would argue that being happy does not always include doing what you are good at. I have found that what you are good at is not always what you love to do, and that what you love to do is not always what you are good at. I love running and cycling, but I'm not that good at them. I would like to get marginally better at them though....
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