Where the Money Is
The psychologist and writer Angela Duckworth says that her father used to tell her. “There are three kinds of people: Thinkers, Doers and Charmers--and you rarely find anyone who’s more than one.” This seems like an oversimplification, but I think it contains some truth.
Thinkers try to plan their way through life. They weigh options, analyze information, and try to draw rational conclusions. They seldom fall prey to rash, impulsive mistakes, but they sometimes tie themselves in knots when there’s not enough information to make a clear decision.
Doers get stuff done. They act first, and weigh outcomes later. They aren’t afraid to forge ahead into uncertainty. Their mistakes and their successes tend to be equally dramatic.
And finally, there are the Charmers. Sometimes “charming” has a slightly pejorative sense, implying manipulation or inauthenticity, but I prefer to think of Charmers as people with emotional intelligence. These people influence the world through relationships. They know how to build trust and connection. Their greatest strengths are their ability to gather support, and to help groups of people function at their best. Their weakness is a tendency to sacrifice precision and results in order to avoid conflict.
As any good leader knows, when you’re assembling a team, you need people from all of these groups on board. A complete lack of any of these skill sets will doom you to failure. I wonder, though, why we should settle for anything less in ourselves as individuals.
Almost everyone tends toward one of these stereotypes more than others. Over time, those aspects of their personality have probably become real strengths, as the world reinforces them and encourages us to keep doing what we’re good at. We may come to identify with those strengths, and define ourselves by them, which leads us to reject the other sides of us that are less dominant. I think that’s a shame.
Shouldn’t we be just as interested in developing our less prominent sides? In a way, we can see them as low-hanging fruit. If you have a real deficit in planfulness, or decisiveness, or emotional intelligence, that may be the source of a lot of the friction in your life. Even a small improvement could make a major difference.
Sure, it feels good to keep going back to the comfort zone of our acknowledged strengths and talents. It’s much more scary to try to address our perceived shortcomings. But as the bank robber Willie Sutton famously said, when asked why he robbed banks: “That’s where the money is.”
