Perhaps the most common approach to finding a good career is to identify your personal strengths, and then look for paths that match them.<\/p>\n
This article summarises the best advice I’ve found on how to identify your strengths, turned into a three-step process. It also includes lists of personal strengths that are most commonly used by researchers (to give you a language to describe your own) and a case study.<\/p>\n
But first, I wanted to give a warning that I think the ‘match with strengths’ approach to choosing a career seems a little overrated.<\/p>\n
Perhaps the biggest risk is limiting yourself based on your current<\/em> strengths, and ignoring your potential to develop new, more potent strengths. This risk is most pressing for younger people, who don’t yet have much data on what they’re good at \u2013 making them more likely to guess incorrectly \u2013 and have decades ahead of them to develop new strengths.<\/p>\n You should ask both<\/em> ‘what are my strengths?’ and also ‘which strengths are worth building?’<\/p>\n More broadly, I’ve argued<\/a> that it’s often better to take the reverse approach to match with strengths: ask what the world most needs<\/em> and then figure out how you might best help with that. This orientation helps you to focus on developing skills that are both valued in the market and that can be used to solve important global problems, which is key to finding a career that’s both meaningful and personally rewarding.<\/p>\n I also think the main reason to ‘focus on your strengths’ is to find something you might be great at in the long term, and I don’t think simple ‘match with strengths’ is obviously the best way of predicting that.<\/p>\n With those caveats in mind, I still think that clarifying your strengths is one<\/em> useful input into career planning \u2014 especially after you’ve had a couple of jobs \u2014 and that there are better ways to do it than the norm.<\/p>\n For instance, I’ve noticed that people often think of their strengths in an overly abstract way. Michelle<\/a>, who’s one of our advisors, thought of herself as introverted, so she didn’t think she’d be a good fit for the job. But when she considered what it involved on a more granular level \u2014 one-on-one conversations about doing good \u2014 she realised this work matched her strengths after all.<\/p>\n These exercises are also useful even if you’re not currently in the middle of a job search. Finding ways to spend more time using your strengths can also make your current job more satisfying (I’ve found the ‘energy audit’ covered in Step 2 especially useful, both for myself and those I work with.)<\/p>\n Negativity bias means we usually focus most on our weaknesses, but most people seem to agree that building a successful career is more about capitalising on your strengths than improving your weaknesses. (Areas of weakness should be brought up to the minimum level needed, simply avoided, or overcome by working with people who are strong where you’re weak.)<\/p>\n Being able to explain your strengths to others is also vital in job interviews and promotions, and these exercises can help with that too.<\/p>\n Finally, assessing your strengths is one of the steps in our full career planning process<\/a> \u2014 so if you’ve been meaning to plan your career, this could be a good jumping-off point.<\/p>\n Table of Contents<\/p> There are three stages:<\/p>\n A short version could involve a quick pass over Step 1, writing one or two paragraphs about two questions from Step 2, and then glancing over Step 3 to see if it further clarifies anything. Or you could spend an afternoon or two really thinking about all of it.<\/p>\n Here are some criteria for what would constitute a strength in the context of longer-term career planning:<\/p>\n I say ‘something’ because I want to keep strengths broad. They can involve skills (e.g. writing, statistics), ability to work in certain contexts (e.g. under pressure, in a big bureaucracy), resources (e.g. connections to influential people), character traits (e.g. persistence, charisma), or abilities (e.g. dexterity).<\/p>\n (For readers familiar with 80,000 Hours: There’s a lot of overlap between strengths and career capital<\/a>. Your strengths will often be your most valuable career capital, though your strengths can also reflect future potential in addition to career capital you already have.)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Bring together all the relevant information. This can help you spot what you’re good at right away, and also informs the next two steps.<\/p>\n Sketch out your education, work history, and hobbies (or look at your CV \/ LinkedIn profile).<\/p>\n Then, try to identify ‘bright spots’ \u2014 times when things went unusually well or you produced unusually good results.<\/p>\n A common pitfall is to focus too much on your absolute level of performance. It takes decades to get good at many skills, and there’s no point comparing yourself to someone who has had far more practice.<\/p>\n Instead, look for times when you performed well compared to people with similar experience to yourself<\/em>. Roughly, you want to find the skills for which, for a cohort of people with similar experience to yourself, you rank highly among the cohort.<\/p>\n You should usually focus more on rate of improvement<\/em> rather than absolute performance. Hopefully rate of improvement is a better proxy for long-term success, and seems to be something that often distinguishes people who later become top performers. (Some even like to define ‘talent’ as your rate of learning.)<\/p>\n One caveat is that how quickly you learn depends a great deal on the context and teaching. So be careful about, for instance, concluding maths isn’t a strength just because you didn’t have a great teacher at school.<\/p>\n Once you’ve identified these bright spots, you can start trying to spot patterns in them. The questions in Step 2 will help with this.<\/p>\n We often don’t notice our strengths, because what we’re good at feels easy and natural, while our weaknesses create headaches.<\/p>\n And although people are overconfident in many ways, they tend to<\/a> underestimate<\/em> their abilities compared to others for difficult<\/em> skills \u2013 like those we’re talking about here.<\/p>\n This makes it especially useful to ask other people about your strengths. (And in general, I’d suggest getting more feedback is generally the best route to self-knowledge \u2013 see more on that in the book Insight<\/em><\/a> by Tasha Eurich.)<\/p>\n You might have had performance reviews at work, and so you might already have a lot of feedback to consider. Are there any patterns in that feedback that might suggest a strength?<\/p>\n If you haven’t had much feedback directly about your strengths in the past \u2014 which is not uncommon \u2014 then you could consider emailing a couple of friends and past co-workers.<\/p>\n This can be a bit awkward, but many people enjoy giving positive feedback, and it may well be the quickest and most useful thing you can do to learn about your strengths.<\/p>\n Here are a couple of questions to consider asking (which we adapted from the Conscious Leadership Group<\/a>):<\/p>\n Are there any themes that come up more than once? Even just asking a couple of people these questions is often enlightening (and motivating), but if you ask 10 or more it’ll become easier to spot patterns.<\/p>\n I’ve gathered some of the best questions I’ve found for helping people clarify their strengths. Now that you’ve collected your thoughts about your past experience, you can use these to go beyond the strengths that are most initially obvious, and to get more precise about how to define them.<\/p>\n If you were only going to reflect on one question, I might pick this one from Paul Graham<\/a>. Look for tasks you find naturally absorbing, exciting, and energising, but aren’t normally experienced that way by others.<\/p>\n He gives the (rather extreme) example of his father:<\/p>\n \n In another conversation he told me that what he really liked was solving problems. To me the exercises at the end of each chapter in a math textbook represent work, or at best a way to reinforce what you learned in that chapter. To him the problems were the reward. The text of each chapter was just some advice about solving them. He said that as soon as he got a new textbook he’d immediately work out all the problems \u2014 to the slight annoyance of his teacher, since the class was supposed to work through the book gradually.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n This question helps you find things you’re likely to be good at, that you’re likely to be able to work on for a long time, and that are unusual \u2014 all key elements of strengths.<\/p>\n These can be hard to spot, since you probably hang out with people similar to yourself, so you may not realise it’s unusual to enjoy what you do. Try to compare yourself to a wider group instead (e.g. your high school class).<\/p>\n A related exercise I and others working at 80,000 Hours have found useful is the ‘energy audit’<\/a>:<\/p>\n This is nice because it’s granular and concrete. Unlike trying to follow your passion, it’s more about specific tasks that are definitely relevant to your work, rather than broad interests.<\/p>\n Besides spotting your strengths, you can also use this exercise to improve your existing role:<\/p>\n Look at the bright spots in your work history. Don’t just classify them by role, but also ask:<\/p>\n In addition, strengths don’t have to be skills. Think more broadly and ask:<\/p>\n Success in almost any career requires years of hard work, and often decades.<\/p>\n This is easy to underestimate: Throughout our education, we’re presented with challenges where it’s possible to do well (e.g. pass the test) in under a year. The world of work is very different \u2014 you can easily work hard for five years, and still be near the bottom of your field.<\/p>\n This means that it’s especially useful to ask yourself something like: What could I imagine working on for 5+ years, even if I didn’t see much success?<\/p>\n Another way to focus on the long term is to focus on strengths that can compound \u2014 grow consistently each year. Even a modest rate of growth can add up to a huge increase over 20 years.<\/p>\n This is especially the case in areas where there are positive feedback loops \u2014 in other words, where early success leads to more success. (This is called the Matthew effect<\/a>.)<\/p>\n This favours focusing on strengths where there is a high ceiling. See a list of strengths with high ceilings here<\/a>.<\/p>\n It can also favour focusing on strengths that can build up in a way that’s hard to quickly copy. That could mean building upon an unusual skill or starting advantage, focusing on something with network effects (e.g. connections), or other difficult-to-replicate career capital like having a good reputation.<\/p>\n Besides just thinking about strengths in isolation, also think about how your strengths might be combined to create especially useful combinations.<\/p>\n One useful rule of thumb is to try to combine 2\u20133 strengths that are not commonly combined. It’s a lot easier to become one of the top people in the world with the intersection<\/em> of 2\u20133 unusual skills than one of the top people in any one of those skills.<\/p>\n This is a common piece of advice that is attributed to Scott Adams<\/a>, the creator of the comic Dilbert:<\/p>\n \n In my case, I can draw better than most people, but I’m hardly an artist. And I’m not any funnier than the average standup comedian who never makes it big, but I’m funnier than most people. The magic is that few people can draw well and write jokes. It’s the combination of the two that makes what I do so rare. And when you add in my business background, suddenly I had a topic that few cartoonists could hope to understand without living it.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Adams doesn’t explain why<\/em> this strategy works. If combining skills were an easy way to become more successful, then everyone would do it. I think the explanation is that people tend to get funnelled into standard paths, but making unusual combinations requires a measure of independent and strategic thinking, and so intersections get neglected. But if you’re reading this post then you probably have the ability to do that.<\/p>\n Some of our priority paths are built around unusual combinations \u2014 for instance, not many people understand both the latest in machine learning and<\/em> how government policy works, making AI policy<\/a> an especially promising career path.<\/p>\n If you don’t feel like you’ve identified your strengths based on the above, here’s a long list of strengths in various categories: work skills, personality, abilities, character traits and work interests. (Note these lists are overlapping. The aim is just to give you lots of ideas, not to be a mutually exclusive classification.)<\/p>\n You can skim them to help both spot strengths you might have missed, and also to give you language to describe the strengths that we’ve uncovered above.<\/p>\n I’ve used research-backed traits that are most used in psychology where available. Just be aware that most of these traits have weak predictive power when it comes to job performance, so definitely don’t think of your results as ‘determining’ what you should work on. Nevertheless, I think they’re still useful because (i) care has gone into designing these traits to be useful as a vocabulary and (ii) weak predictive power is still useful \u2014 so long as you don’t put too much weight on the predictors.<\/p>\n Work skills are more changeable than what we might most naturally think of as strengths, but they’re obviously a relevant way of categorising your abilities if you’re doing career planning.<\/p>\n Here is the list of skills<\/a> used by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics to categorise the skills needed in hundreds of the most common jobs.<\/p>\n Basic Skills<\/strong><\/p>\n Social Skills<\/strong><\/p>\n Complex Problem Solving Skills<\/strong><\/p>\n Technical Skills<\/strong><\/p>\n Systems Skills<\/strong><\/p>\n Resource Management Skills<\/strong><\/p>\n You might be interested to read our rough analysis of which of these are most correlated with employability<\/a>.<\/p>\n Here is a list of skills that we’ve found useful to use within the effective altruism community when discussing potential bottlenecks to progress on the most pressing problems. You can see results of a 2019 survey on which of these are most valuable<\/a>.<\/p>\n List of useful work skills in effective altruism:<\/p>\n The most widely used way of classifying personality used in research is the Big Five<\/a> (not Myers Briggs<\/a>!), which is based on a cluster analysis of words used to describe personality.<\/p>\n It breaks personality into the following five factors, which can be further subdivided into subfactors<\/a>. (Though in the opposite direction, some psychologists have amusingly proposed that since the factors are partially correlated, you can also compress down into a single factor for ‘good’ personality.)<\/p>\n These traits weakly<\/em> correlate with some aspects of job performance (e.g. openness with creativity, agreeableness with teamwork, disagreeableness with leadership, conscientiousness and stability with working hard, etc.)<\/p>\n Sometimes a sixth dimension is added for integrity and honesty (which also seems to be useful for predicting job performance).<\/p>\n Note that many other popular traits usually correlate a lot with the Big Five, and it’s debated whether they are new constructs or instead a combination of personality and learned skills. Here are some other ways of categorising personality, with some very rough comments about overlap.<\/p>\n List of other strengths that are personality traits:<\/p>\n<\/span>How to identify your personal strengths? A summary<\/h2>\n
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<\/span>How to use the full process<\/h2>\n
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<\/span>What are strengths?<\/h2>\n
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<\/span>1. Gather data<\/h2>\n
<\/span>Look for bright spots in your work history compared to those with similar experience<\/h3>\n
<\/span>If there’s time, collect extra feedback<\/h3>\n
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<\/span>2. Reflect on these questions and prompts<\/h2>\n
<\/span>What doesn’t feel like work (but is)?<\/h3>\n
<\/span>What do you find most energising? (‘Energy audit’)<\/h3>\n
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<\/span>Look for patterns based on many categories<\/h3>\n
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<\/span>What’s my most useful career capital?<\/h3>\n
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<\/span>Where do you feel most determined?<\/h3>\n
<\/span>What might be a compounding edge?<\/h3>\n
<\/span>What unusual combinations can you make?<\/h3>\n
<\/span>3. Review these lists of personal strengths<\/h2>\n
<\/span>Work skills<\/h3>\n
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<\/span>Personality traits<\/h3>\n
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