So, what are your diamonds? What are the capabilities that you have on your own heart and soul that you can access to begin to developed the kind of inner, and outer success that will feel the most satisfying to you? I've got them down in four categories. And in general, it's kind of counter intuitive, but it's often in case that you can move forward by first looking backwards. So we all have childhood and youthful interests and passions that we engaged with when we were kids that we left behind, and they didn't count anymore after you started taking standardized tests, and tried to get to be number one in your class or whatever it was. And now, you've reached an adult stage and there's something incomplete or you wouldn't be thinking about this subject. So I always like to go back and say, look, look back at those years when you were 8 to 15 and ask yourself, what was I really interested in? What was the thing that lit me up, that got me out of bed, that was exciting and I enjoyed? I think it's often the case that buried in there, ask your parents. Ask a childhood friend, what was it that we really enjoyed doing? And it tempting to say, well, that was just kid stuff. We were just playing and pretending that we were like cave explorers or cowboys or whatever, but buried in those childhood interest just below the surface is going to be an activity. A motivation that is still brimming inside you and waiting for the opportunity to be elicited by your work environment or a hobby you're engaged in. So from my own standpoint, I'll just give you a quick example from my own life. So I told you I was on this long journey and I ended up living at home in the basement in my house, in my parent's house. And eventually, I came to the insight that I needed to make a living and selling insulation door to door was not probably going to be a long-term answer. So I thought to myself, what am I good at? And the answer was I'm pretty good at words. I'm major in English when I was in college. I was terrible at Math. So a lot of things got ruled out by not good at numbers, but one of the things that was pretty good were words. So I checked off a bunch of things that I might be a teacher of and kind of came to a decision that law might be an option, if I could get into a law school. So I went to law school not because I was passionate about being a lawyer, because I need to make a living and I needed to get out of my house. So but what happened in law school, then the first semester was what has led me to sitting in this chair talking to you. I was in one of the required courses that were 150 people sitting in the classroom. There was a teacher in front teaching about contract law and all the students in the class were paying very close attention, because this person. He was teaching a stuff. He was going to be on the bar exam and that we needed to pass in order to get our diplomas, but it was focused. And I realized I was sitting there and the professor asked a question, and my hand shot into the air, and I looked around and there were all these other people with their hands up, and I had this out of body experience. I almost looked like I floated above all 150 students. I looked down on this whole scene and I realized what I actually wanted to do, and be was the teacher in the front of the room. Having everybody on the edge of their seats, waiting to hear what the question would be and what the answer was and that then flipped me to one level deeper and I realized that performing had been something I loved to do ever since I was like five years old. I mean, in my little plays that we ran when I was a kid, I was the farmer in The Farmer in the Dell. I had the lead role in the fifth grade play and I loved it. I loved everything about it. I loved being the center of attention. I loved singing the songs. And so this whole thing suddenly went uh-huh, the professor in the front of the room was getting a chance to perform. It wasn't The Farmer in the Dell, but it was a important subject that you can make a living on. And so, I began my quest. Very simple from there on it was what do I have to do to get to be a professor? I wasn't sure what I'd profess, except it has something to do with my law degree. And so from that little moment of insight inside my own diamonds, I discovered my joy in performing and how I could use that to become a teacher in a college environment and thrive. So it's that sort of things that you might trivialize and say, well, I was the lead in my play when I was in fifth grade. But in there is the seed of something, it maybe that you like solving puzzles. It maybe that you were really are good at helping people or being someone who cared for an elderly parent or someone who loved being the head of your little club, as a kid. Those little seeds are still alive and all they need's a little water and they'll bloom into a capability that will be incredibly powerful to you, because they go all the way back into your genes and the evidence of it is how far back in your own life they go. So that's childhood interests, passions, capabilities. I think when you start, that's diamond number one. Diamond number two, what are the actual aptitudes and skills that are things you can do better than most people? Now, there's a lot of advice you can access on this. This is not something I'll be able to teach you in this course, but this is where career counseling, career coaches, skills assessments, all the kinds of different things that you can find out that just give you a sense of what your special aptitudes are that are a little better than other people's. One of my colleagues here at the University of Pennsylvania is a women named Angela Duckworth, she just has published a best selling book on perseverance called Grit and she actually took the success course the first year I taught it as a student, she was a PhD student. And one of the thing she taught me was that capability, skills and altitudes are subject to a very interesting amplification process where the more skills you're able to put together in a single coordinated activity and you're unusually good at one thing and another thing and another thing and this activity actually calls on you to use all those skills. The more likely it is that you'll strive and become excellent at that skill, I give you an example. Julia Child's, a famous celebrity cook from the last generation. So, Julia Child's started out as a writer. She studied writing when she was in college. She graduated and went to work as an ad writer in New York and she loved writing, but she wasn't actually very good at writing just as a writer. And so, she ended up deciding to quit and she went off on a journey that were war came about. She became involved in helping with what was we call it the CIA now, but it was sort of the Security Services and the Defense Intelligence Services. And so she got really good and realized she had a capability at aggregating lots of data and different perspectives, then she found her husband also during the war. He happened to be a gourmet cook and introduced her to fine food, and French cooking. They lived in Paris, she found that she had a real aptitude for cooking. So now, notice what happens. She's a good writer. She's good at aggregating lots of data and now she likes cooking. And as she began to put all these together, she was a pretty good writer. Pretty good cook. Pretty good aggregator, but a cook who can write an aggregate data and put together a really amazing world class cook book that's written really well. That's more unusual. So, she then became a celebrity cook book writer from putting these three things together and the final stage of her career was sort of an accident. One day, she was living in Boston and a TV show that had a cooking show on it. There regular chef was sick or something and she new the person who was the producer and they called and said, could you help us out? And they put her on TV and she had always liked to be the ham at the party. She always liked to be the person who cut up and made jokes and was the sort of clown of the party and she brought that instinct, which is just another capability, which standing alone is nothing. Add that to being someone who can cook and then you have a comedian celebrity chef, the first one in American culture and she became a legend. So that's what happens when you aggregate aptitudes, which each one alone is nothing special. But when you put them all together and you're doing something that people pay you for that causes all four of these to work in harmony in a special circumstance, bingo. It's really special. So, you're just looking in there for the aptitudes and the skills that are genuine. I tell a story to my students sometimes about a plumber I know who was really good working with his hands, really good with fine motor skills ended up being a surgeon. He just went to stop being a plumber. He went back to school. Got the premed done and is now a fine surgeon. A friend of mine actually my book agent, a guy I've worked with for almost 20 years on all the different books I've written has a friend up in Cape Cod area who was a dentist and was pretty successful dentist; but he woke up one day and decided he hated having his hands in people's mouths. And so he began thinking, what can I do with these skills and he had a hobby of making jewelry. He quit being a dentist, went full time to using these fine motor skills to make jewelry. It's the same sort of skill you use when you're creating a crown or making a filling, but you're making something beautiful that people can wear and now he's a full-time jewelry-maker. He works with his wife on a cruise line making jewelry for people. A transfer of the skills to something more fun and more lucrative in the satisfaction sense. I had a former student that loved doing Lego work when she was little. She graduated and is perfectly happy now building financial models on Wall Street. Same kind of models that she made when she was working with her hands to make little Lego toys, but now she does it conceptually with her mind and mathematics that she has learned and the final example that I have of this is a wonderful story of a student that I had who was one of my success students. She was going into consulting. She wrote her final paper about her own theory of success and embedded in this paper was the fact that she felt the most satisfaction, and the most connection with others when she was able to help comfort people, and use it by the power of touch. She had a 100-year old grandfather who she attended and who has been somebody who had been a mentor for her, and she just wrote about this feeling of touching, and helping others heal. I got an email from her a couple years after she graduated. She'd gone into consulting just as she prepared for it from boarding school and she recognized that she was pretty good at consulting with very unsatisfied with what it was making her do, what sort of the skills it was asking her to perform. She's good at them and she didn't really enjoy them. And so she had decided to go back to nursing school, get a new undergraduate degree, so that she could become a nurse. And then specialize in geriatric nursing, so that she could use her hands to help heal people and I got an email from her about a year and a half ago. She just graduated from New York University's nursing program. She had her first job at Surgeon's Hospital and she was in the geriatric ward, living a life that used her capabilities and her passions in a very different way than when I first met her. So thinking about aptitudes and skills, they're really in some ways genetic. So, they're very stable once you recognize them. A second diamond, well worth your consideration. The third diamond is just look back all your accumulated experiences. They're uniquely yours. They tell a story of your mentors, your training and even things that you may have learned in a professional experience. That at the time you didn't enjoy, because it was in a context that didn't give you much satisfaction. When you pull them together, you're unique set of experiences, when they're purposed the right way will be the source of enormous competitive advantage for you in the context in which you're going to use them. So I mean, it's one of the things I was thinking since I can't have you in my class, I was thinking how can you begin to put some of these things to use? And I thought, perhaps a good idea would be to take out a piece of paper and make a little journal for yourself where you can lift on a page, somewhere your youthful interest and passions. Where you can put down on the page a different assessment you've taken over the years that have probed your aptitudes and skills and make a list of those, take a look at the different experiences you've had and don't dismiss any of them as irrelevant. Ask your friends, your partner, your parents, what are some of the experiences that you've had that helped you, that brought you to where you are? I mean, one of the hardest jobs I ever had was I was a waiter in a high-end restaurant in Charlottesville, Virginia. I had to dress up in a silly little colonial outfit to weigh on tables, but the experience of being able to multitask, the experience of being able to manage my relations with people I didn't know very well and create rapport to create expectations that I was able to meet. Those experiences, very powerful and very helpful to me now. Working with executives, working with the parents and students. So your accumulated experiences, you leave nothing behind if your on a right track and then the final diamond of the four is your personality. Once again, they're many personality assessments you can take that tell whether you're an introvert or an extrovert. I have an assessment I called it The Same Profiler, it'll be able to you as a part of this course. S-A-M-E stands for the various dimensions of personality that relate to social skills, that's S. Action skills, that's A. Mindsets, that's M and emotions, that's E and you'll find it very simple. They're just a set of items and their statements. And then you just say on a continuum, which statement is more true for you and you locate a little x and then assess at the end which are the one that stand out the most. You can take this one step further. My student find it useful, because you can take the same assessment that were going to post and you can send it out to your social network. People that know you well and don't tell them what your answers were, just ask them for their perspectives on what they think your personality is and then you can compare what your network tells you as a sort of mirror image or echo to what you think of yourself and then try to put those two together to get a reading on your personality. So four diamonds, youthful passions and interests. Genuine aptitudes and skills. Accumulated experiences and your personality. If you put some work into discovering where you are on all four of those, very often some patterns begin to emerge that help you begin to think about why you've enjoyed certain things that you've done in the past? What might be something or set of things that might be appealing issue walking to the future? So your diamonds are important, they're yours. They're uniquely yours in the nowhere, but in your own heart, your own mind and your own memory. So with that in your pocket, we're going to take a pause and then be ready for our next session.
