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.