Why a strength test is a terrible predictor of how good you can be at acquiring a skill
You're told repeatedly to work on your strengths and drop your weaknesses. But strength tests are terrible because people are strong under some conditions and hopeless in others. Why do it anyway?
One of the great myths of our time is that we have strengths and weaknesses.
You don't have to look far to find a test where you answer about 60 questions. Those answers are crunched by some giant machine and voilà—your strengths and weaknesses are clear to you. You should—they inform you—work on your strengths and turn down the volume on your weakness.
Except that such tests of personality are mostly feel-good stuff
Notice, I call it feel good stuff, and not feel-good nonsense. When people feel good about something, it gives them an invisible force to act. They're convinced about a strength, causing them to put more effort in that area, thus pushing the strength towards a superpower. When viewed through such a prism, the strength test is a very good thing indeed, working as efficiently as a placebo.
But how do we know it's feel good?
Let's say it tells you that one of your strengths is your persistence. I know a client who matched this persistence strength exactly. To win a competition, she had to work extremely hard for an entire year. She never gave up. Yet, if you were to give her a tiny puzzle to solve, she looks at it for about 30 seconds and then throws in the towel. And this is no esoteric story, either. Take any strength or weakness of your own and put it in a different context and you're sure to find that you're both strong at some things and weak at others—and vice versa.
Personality sits in a similar box
We may look at a friend and call them bold, but put them in a different situation and they get far more reserved. A person who's seemingly extroverted becomes introverted. And the introvert becomes a chatterbox. Which is to say that while we truly believe that we're all well-wired from the very start, our brains react to situations as they arise.
Which of course, makes everything even more puzzling
Isn't our personality hard wired? Or is it not? The answer usually lies in context.
Someone who's shy, may still have the core level of shyness in place, but have tools to overcome that weakness consistently. So much so, in fact, that you'd never know who they really are.
And even they don't know who they really are.
Before the strengths test, they had a hunch but then, based on a random set of unchallenged questions, they tweak or even change their behaviour. Or, because of the demands put on them, learn to be more persistent, bold, talkative etc.
While they still are very much the people they are, they're no longer at the starting point they once occupied. They're down the road, over the hill and quite contentedly sitting on a rock at midway point.
Hence, anything can be learned. And if it takes a strength test to push you along, so be it. If you do a strengths test, and you come out looking great, work on those elements that you feel good about. And no matter who you are, you’ll end up a lot better in those areas.
Even if the test is just a placebo.
If you're wondering if there’s more to talent than what you’ve been told, maybe pressing that big blue button is a good idea. It won’t hurtle you onto Mars. It’s more likely to let you know when a new article shows up. It may even give you the nudge you need to write, draw, or make a great curry. Hence, go ahead click away. :)
Oh, and if you want to know about me, me, me. I’m Sean D'Souza. Just another Kiwi who lives in middle Earth and enjoys the sweeping views of New Zealand. Oh, I’m a cartoonist too. And a writer. And um, I’d better stop. If you want to see some stuff, you can amble across to Psychotactics.com as well.