Critical Mass – All About You by Marcus Buckingham

In The Truth About You, Marcus Buckingham seeks to provide tips on how to achieve success in your professional life. He breaks it down into five steps, five pieces of advice he wished he had and calls the best advice you’ll ever get.

While Buckingham does provide some good advice in this book, it’s difficult to sift through the empty platitudes to get the interesting stuff.

People make trade-offs like “I am interested in A, but I really want to be doing B”. Buckingham says, “They force you to do something almost impossible: put your real personality on hold and then try to bring it back to life at some point in the future. The problem is that while you’re waiting for that future to arrive, you spend hour upon hour, for years at a time, doing things that don’t interest you.” Sorry, but that’s called life. Not everyone is able to make a living or provide for a family doing the things they love. Performance is the point, and why not perform your best no matter whether it is something that interests you or not?

I found part of the book contradictory. “And so when that “future” finally arrives, you aren’t the same person anymore. You’ve lost yourself along the way.” But on page 14, truth #1 says “as you grow you become more and more of who you already are.” Having trouble connecting these two statements.

The third step is quite useful. It’s always beneficial to find out exactly what you will be doing before taking a job. In my field, sometimes people are hired thinking they are going to be writing one type of software, then end up doing something totally different and inescapably boring. That is the nature of work though. Sometimes it can be fulfilling and exciting, and sometimes it can be an absolute snooze fest. It is important to know what you will be expected to do before taking a position or volunteering.

You will never find the perfect job, the book suggests that you can turn your job into something that is more suited to you. Buckingham suggests that you slowly push your strengths to your employer, evolving your job responsibilities into those which are more fitting with your strengths. While this is great advice, it’s important to remember rule #1, that performance is always the point. If that strength you want to use doesn’t fit with what the company is trying to provide, then it’s not a good idea to push that on your manager.

The Truth About You suggests that since you can’t turn weaknesses into strengths, you should either ignore them, partner with someone who will take care of them, sharpen your strengths so that your weaknesses become irrelevant, or look at your weakness through a strength. This last one is good advice, as it gives you a way to still perform your weaknesses through one of your strengths. One might even look at this as turning a weakness into a strength.

As a book review this might seem rather hyper-critical, but that’s simply because I see several holes in Buckingham’s five step plan to success. Do I think that some people will benefit from reading it? Absolutely they will. There a good ideas in here once you get past the “five easy steps” mentality. It’s not a bad book, just not my cup of tea.