Marcus Buckingham, co-author of the best-selling Gallup book, Now, Discover Your Strengths, just released his new book, StandOut: The Groundbreaking New Strengths Assessment from the Leader of the Strengths Revolution. His take is that the most successful and fulfilled people are those who spend more time developing their strengths than they do trying to fix their weaknesses. He also says that companies who encourage employees to focus on their strengths are more likely to thrive.
There’s one portion of a recent interview that might be of interest to high school students considering what to study in college. At the 8:50 point of this podcast, he tackles the question, “Do strengths change over time? If I’m strong on something when I’m 15, am I going to be strong on the same thing when I’m 35 or 45?”
His answer:
Your personality doesn’t change much over the course of your life. If you’re ordered and structured at 15, you’re going to be ordered and structured at 35. If you have a natural feeling of empathy at 15, you’re going to have an insane sense of other peoples’ emotions at 35. What changes of course are two things—your skills, so you can change what you know how to do, how to apply that empathy or structure. And you can change your experience. So the experience in the form of your values, those will of course change throughout the course of your life. And you change your perspective on yourself, so the experience you get in living with your empathy and understanding how that works for you…So the things that change in the course of your life are experience and skills. Your natural recurring patterns of thought or feeling or behavior or emotion, those things don’t change.
Many high school students feel pressure to pick a college major that ties directly to a future career, like accounting, journalism or engineering. But while strengths stay the same, the skills and experiences you will have change. That means that if you love the order and precision of math and it’s always been your best subject, you’ll probably always enjoy that type of thinking. But it doesn’t necessarily mean that you’ll love being an accountant at 35 or 45. You might consider picking a college and major that helps you develop the strength without limiting yourself to one career. It's the difference between majoring in math and majoring in accounting.
I'm not against pre-professional majors and they are the right choice for some students. But please remember that if you're planning on going to college, you don't necessarily need to identify your future career first.