Quotes from Donald O. Clifton

1. Each person's talents are enduring and unique. 2. Each person's greatest room for growth is in the areas of his or her greatest strength.

Knowledge consists of the facts and lessons learned. Skills are the steps of an activity. These three-talents, knowledge, and skills-combine to create your strengths.

Our definition of a weakness is anything that gets in the way of excellent performance.

As John Bruer describes in The Myth of the First Three Years, nature has developed three ways for you to learn as an adult: Continue to strengthen your existing synaptic connections (as happens when you perfect a talent with relevant skills and knowledge), keep losing more of your extraneous connections (as also happens when you focus on your talents and allow other connections to deteriorate), or develop a few more synaptic connections.

Rapid learning offers another trace of talent. Sometimes a talent doesn't signal itself through yearning. For a myriad of reasons, although the talent exists within you, you don't hear its call. Instead, comparatively late in life, something sparks the talent, and it is the speed at which you learn a new skill that provides the telltale clue to the talent's presence and power.

Satisfactions provide the last clue to talent. As we described in the previous chapter, your strongest synaptic connections are designed so that when you use them, it feels good. Thus, obviously, if it feels good when you perform an activity, chances are that you are using a talent.

As the wit W. C. Fields advised: 'If at first you don't succeed, try again. Then quit. There is no point making a fool of yourself.' This advice is easy to give and difficult to put into practice, but as you build your strengths, sometimes making great progress, sometimes slipping back, take comfort from the fact that this is how a strong life is supposed to be lived.

If there is any difference between you and me, it may simply be that I get up every day and have a chance to do what I love to do, every day.

The acid test of a strength? The ability is a strength only if you can fathom yourself doing it repeatedly, happily, and successfully.

Thus, the lesson we should draw from these people is not that each person's talents are infinitely malleable or that they can be anything they want to be if they just apply themselves. Rather, the lesson is that talents, like intelligence, are value neutral. If you want to change your life so that others may benefit from your strengths, then change your values. Don't waste time trying to change your talents.

The bottom line on skills is this: A skill is designed to make the secrets of the best easily transferable. If you learn a skill, it will help you get a little better, but it will not cover for a lack of talent. Instead, as you build your strengths, skills will actually prove most valuable when they are combined with genuine talent.

Talent is any recurring pattern of thought, feeling, or behavior that can be productively applied.

Such questions are labeled 'ipsative,' which means that if in reality you have both, the question makes it impossible for you to show up with both.

Each of these strategies-get a little better at it, design a support system, use one of your strongest themes to overwhelm your weakness, find a partner, and just stop doing it-can help you as you strive to build your life around your strengths.

Our research into human strengths does not support the extreme, and extremely misleading, assertion that 'you can play any role you set your mind to,' but it does lead us to this truth: Whatever you set your mind to, you will be most successful when you craft your role to play to your signature talents most of the time.

What leaders have in common is that each really knows their strengths, has developed their strengths, and can call on the right strength at the right time.

At an early age, you started hearing it: It's a virtue to be "well-rounded." ... They might as well have said : Become as dull as you possibly can be.