The biggest challenge I see in getting people to apply a strength-focused approach to personal development is that many people remain (blissfully) unaware of the value of a weakness. When people view all of their skills equally, they work on their skills until their performance in their weakest area is as good as their performance in their strongest area. They never allow themselves to fall short of doing their best. Unfortunately, though well intended I think this mentality leads people to inadvertently reduce their own potential.
How does this process work? My experience suggests that the process of asking people to 'wear many hats' and excel across the board starts as soon as students receive their first report card. In school, a kid who gets an 'A+' in one subject but fails all the other subjects is never considered smart (especially if he got the high mark in something trivial like art, music, or blogging). The kid who gets a 'B' across the board, on the other hand, is at least considered smart enough to understand how to be well-rounded. If the student can lift a handful of those ‘B’ grades to an ‘A-’ level, the student is often considered smart. Eventually, the pressure of the GPA stunts and molds a student into a graduate incapable of focusing on doing one thing very well (except for, maybe, conforming).
I meet a lot of people these days that assess value in the way schools identify smart kids. This is understandable in the logic of the GPA. Just do the math… and the science… and the history… right? The concept applies the ‘Renaissance Man’ ideal to students. In doing so, it punishes the variation across secondary performance categories observed in those who often achieve specialized real world success. In real life, we are rewarded based on what we do well and encouraged to find someone else to help us with what we do poorly (2).
By that standard, a student who gets an 'A+' in any subject should probably be considered in the same class as the straight-B student, even if the 'A+' kid fails every other course. An 'A+' in one subject is extremely difficult to get. From my experience, taking one 'A' up to an 'A+' took much more work than maintaining any number of “B’s” across the board (3).
In real life, people who manage an 'A+' in one area tend to hire other people to 'sit the exams' in their ‘C-’ areas for them. A chef might hire a plumber to fix his toilet, for example, while the plumber might hire a tailor to fit his suit. And who might the tailor pay to fix him dinner? This little cycle on repeat is called My Boring Society and it's a magical place where the toilets flush, the clothes fit, and everyone looks forward to dinner. Sounds OK, right? And yet, the way schools pressure students you'd think everyone's dream was to live in a place where your plumber was just as good at cooking fish as the tailor was at unclogging your pipes.
It's not crazy that people think about themselves in the way they were first taught in school. Everything you need to know you learned in kindergarten, right (4)? Anything stressed since such a young age seems natural after enough time. Some of the positive qualities that adults envy in many young children – curiosity, a tendency to experiment, the ability to articulate needs – give way gradually throughout childhood to make room for the negative qualities that adults feel burdened with – discomfort with change, a preference for verified fact, an inability to express themselves. Schools and their routines, correct answers, and overwhelming pressure toward conformity undoubtedly play a major role in this transformation.
A lot of what schools do is highly valuable for the young minds in their charge. But if the stated goal of a school is to prepare students for real world success, then everything in their power should work toward this goal. The GPA system is a trivial but highly symbolic part of the current misalignment between schools and this goal. Instead of giving equal weight to every subject a student studies, schools should consider a scoring system that better approximates how graduates succeed in the real world by cultivating strengths while helping students learn to work around rather than eliminate their most valuable asset: their weaknesses.
Footnotes / a warning about hat racks / logically speaking
1. Maybe if I kept some hydras in my company…
I’d love to know the origin of the expression ‘wearing many hats’. I’ve seen a lot in my three decades but I’ve never seen someone actually wear multiple hats – usually, people wear one hat at the most (and most people don’t wear a hat).
In a sense, asking people to ‘wear many hats’ is like asking them to become hat racks. Hat racks are nice. They store many hats. But most people compliment others for the hat atop the head, not for all the hats that are stored at home. TOA verdict: don't be a hat rack.
2. Internal logic never holds up, unless it does…
The logic to the GPA system is entirely internal – so it either makes no sense or perfect sense, depending on your point of view. It made sense to me when I was in school and makes no sense to me now. Know what I mean?
3. Anyone wanna help me open this private school?
A GPA system that ranked students into tiers by their highest grade and broke ties within tiers using traditional GPA calculations might work pretty well here. It would account for gifted students in areas like music, art, or sports without punishing the nerds who did well in the old system (by basically getting an 'A+' in everything).
The system would 'harm' the straight 'B+' student by pushing their class ranking down. But is this a horrible result? A lot of young adults drift early in their careers, worrying about 'committing' to a career path and wasting valuable time in the process. I wonder if part of the issue is a lack of experience in committing to anything in high school – a time when generalization and keeping options open is encouraged. How could a high school help students practice commitment as a skill? My GPA setup could be one way to do so.
4. I went to an alternative kindergarten...
We were taught to (a) never to accept candy from strangers and (b) never get into a car with a stranger unless (c) they were driving us around town on the behalf of a ride share company.
