Why you aren't a Rocket Scientist

In cleaning out my office, I came across a unique book that I was required to review while working in a manager position several years ago.  The book was called:  “Now discover your strengths” by Marcus Buckingham. 

Momma always said I could fly to the moon if I just put my mind to it.  This book, teamed with huge amounts of research and data, challenged this notion.  What the book proposed was that as infants, the neurological pathways are set, our learning patterns are established at a very young age, and they transcend into our adulthood.  A person’s talents or strengths are hardwired from when we are born and this cannot be changed. 

This was an interesting concept because most companies focus on a person’s weaknesses and throw countless dollars to get them to overcome that weakness.  Now it may be true you can spend money on giving tools to people to help them better manage their deficiency but it will likely never make them a super performer at a task where they are weak.  The premise of the book is rather to identify a person’s strengths; and position people in a role where they require use of their abilities.  Get the right people on the bus, and get the people in the right seats, was an analogy.  Training should focus on reinforcing and building up a person’s natural abilities rather than aiding a weakness.

At the time I was reading the book, I also participated in a questionnaire that identified my strengths.   It absolutely nailed what I saw as strengths in myself.   It characterised traits and tendencies that were bang on.

The conflict, however, was that many of the concepts of the book seemed a little in conflict with Kung Fu. "But a master, rather than condemning himself for his "ordinariness", will embrace his ordinariness and use it as a foundation for building the extraordinary"  (Mastery by Stewart Emery). Are there limitations surrounding the way you are wired to what you can master?  I believe everyone has limitations, and that we revert to thought processes that have been “hardwired” into us.  When you subtract large numbers, do you subtract from the nearest hundred or count up from the nearest ten?  Do you prefer to learn a form by learning each movement independently and piece it together afterwards, or running through the entire set of movements and work details out later.

However, in watching candidates over the years become black belts and display mastery in the presence of what seems like insurmountable challenges, I have to think the brain is more dynamic than what the book suggests.  It is nothing new that we all possess talents, but I think that is the beauty of Kung Fu.  In the process I believe you learn more about yourself and in that, you find hidden talents and new strengths that no amount of research or questionnaires could draw from you.  Learning to optimize what you already know you have; find something new within; and become more than what the world says you can. To me, that is Kung Fu.