176
people found this helpful, as of 2023
ranked #196,938 most helpful
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★☆☆☆☆
No help for artists
I was VERY disappointed by this book, for four reasons.
First, it seems geared to those who will live their lives inside organizations. What if you are able to see and appreciate beauty and want to be an artist or create your life as a work of art? What if you are fascinated with and drawn to nature and want to live close to it and teach others to appreciate it? You won't find your strengths in these areas acknowledged here, and you won't get any help with shaping your work accordingly. The test finds what it looks for, and what it looks for seems stuck in some very early management behavior paradigm.
Second, you're given no help with figuring out how your five top strengths might be knit into a meaningful career/life.
Third, if you take the test on a off day, when you're not feeling good about yourself or are overly influenced by something that just happened, and then you want to retake the test on a better day to verify the results, you can't. You can only use the passcode one time to go through the test.
Fourth, the 34 themes are titled so sloppily that it appears the publisher didn't want to pay a good editor to make them parallel in construction. Why name the themes Achiever, Adaptability, Belief, and Command? What would have been wrong with revising these to be Achiever, Adaptor, Believer, Commander? This seems symptomatic of some really sloppy thinking. And no, Analytical was not one of my strengths, but I took the test on an off day.
I frankly don't understand all the five-star reviews and Tom Rath's success.
June 2008 · Books · verified purchase