Go put your strengths to work

If there was one thing the flop School for Scoundrels got right, it was the part where chief scoundrel Billy Bob Thornton asks a roomful of losers which one of them owned a self-help book. All of them did. That, he said, is your first problem. You can't help yourself because yourself sucks.

That, in a nutshell, would kind of explain my distaste for self-help books.

I have trawled the web for book reviews of Marcus Buckingham's book and so far the most negative comment I came across was that it was not "essential reading". I haven't read the book. But I did see one of his videos for class. His main point is that we grow most in our areas of strength, not our weakness. Therefore we need to work in order to put our strengths in play and slowly reduce time spent on our weaknesses. This would seem to be the secret to a successful, happy life.

There is nothing wrong with how he defined our strengths and weaknesses. In fact, I found his method of identifying strengths and weaknesses insightful, or at least sensible. It's a useful exercise in self-discovery. However, do we really need someone else to tell us how to understand ourselves? What I discovered after trying out one of his exercises was what I already knew.

My major problem with his argument is that life is not split into our strengths and weaknesses. Life is much more complicated than that. Just as life is not only composed of black and white, but large swathes of grey, it's absurd to attempt to divide life into two. Strengths are two-edged swords. You may a be natural leader of men, but then again, so were Hitler, Saddam, and Stalin. Success is such an ambiguous term. In any case, should you take the book's contents to heart, you'd end up focusing so much on your strengths that you'd become a rather selfish person.

But what do I know? The man's making money by telling people how to succeed, just like him. His books and videos, full of motivational nonsense, are flying off the shelves. It's a scam. One big scam. He's playing on people's insecurities and fears. And people are buying it. They can't help themselves.