The Girl Who Fell From The Sky by Heidi W. Durrow, 2010

Elevator Pitch Summary: Narrated by both adolescent and adult characters, this book is an insightful story of a mulatto girl who not only has to deal with the inherent racism in the United States, but also the mysterious death of her family.

This is a quick read with a suspenseful storyline surrounding the protagonist Rachel's family's death.

Read this if you're in the mood for: A good, page-turning book that highlights some unpleasant things about how kids and adults treat and perceive race in the United States.

Black or White
The daughter of an African American military man and Danish woman, Rachel grows up in Europe before her mother Nella leaves her father for another man and uproots her family to Chicago.

The story begins with Rachel moving to Portland to live with her grandmother and aunt.  Each chapter is voiced by a different character so parallel story lines run concurrently.

While starting their new lives in the United States, Rachel and her mother soon realize that in the US, race not only defines a person, but also is a critical part of one's identity.

As a result, Rachel and her siblings are not seen as individuals with distinct personalities.  Instead, they are perceived as oddities who need to be classified as either black or white.

With its different voices, the novel effectively tells of the struggles that Rachel must deal with concerning race at school, and the struggles her mother Nella must deal with in the adult world, which sadly, is not much more forgiving or understanding than the elementary, junior high and high school worlds that Rachel inhabits. 

Falling From The Sky
An underlying storyline that drives the novel is the mystery surrounding the tragedy of Rachel's family's death, which is how Rachel ends up in Portland with her grandmother and aunt.

Two endearing characters stem from this storyline and provide a fuller view of Nella's struggles and love for her children.

Bellwether Prize
The Girl Who Fell From The Sky was awarded the Bellwether Prize for Fiction, which is a prize established (and funded) in 2000 by Barbara Kingsolver to recognize fiction that addresses social justice issues.

I have not read anything by Kingsolver, but know friends who have and highly recommend her books.

Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahnman, 2011

Elevator Pitch Summary: Written by a Noble Prize winner, this book provides an excellent, easy to understand overview on psychology.  Daniel Kahneman is a renown researcher on decision making who has the ability to break down complex theories and ideas into concepts for people without a background in psychology (like me).

Read this if you're in the mood for: Thinking.  And, spending time with a substantive book.  At 512 pages, the book is packed with research summaries, as well as exercises for the readers that are astoundingly accurate in terms of predicting and understanding the thought process. 

The book is broken out into short chapters with summary statements written in simple, generic terms that effectively convey concepts to the reader.  This makes the conveyance of so much knowledge manageable. 

System 1 and System 2
Kahnman uses generic descriptors System 1 and System 2 to describe judgment and decision making.  System 1 does the "fast" thinking - perusing, collecting information rapidly and making quick assumptions. 

For example, when entering a crowded room, System 1 scans the room and makes the assessment of what to do next.  Due to its fast thinking, System 1 tends to make inaccurate and stereotypical assumptions as it looks for shortcuts to process information.

System 2 does the "slow" thinking and is the logical partner that corrects inaccuracies from System 1.  Studies have shown that furrowing eyebrows represents System 2 at work.

Both these systems exist within everyone, so the key is the balance of these two systems.  "...many people are overconfident, prone to place too much faith in their intuitions," Kahnman writes.  "They apparently find cognitive effort at least mildly unpleasant and avoid it as much as possible."

This statement resonates with me; yet so does the following: "Too much concern about how well one is doing in a task sometimes disrupts performance by loading short-term memory with pointless anxious thoughts."
 

Great - this means that I tend to be extreme in my utilization of slow, System 2 thinking.  Either my System 2 is too lazy and allows my System 1 to run the show, or my System 2 kicks into overdrive and shuts down my System 1.  Now that I am aware of my behavior, I realize that I need to work on achieving a balance.

Other Psychological Concepts
The following excerpts from the book resonated with me:

"A reliable way to make people believe in falsehoods is frequent repetition, because familiarity is not easily distinguished from truth."

"Mood evidently affects the operation of System 1: When we are uncomfortable and unhappy, we lose touch with our intuition."

"The measure of success for System 1 is the coherence of the story it manages to create.  The amount and quality of the data on which the story is based are largely irrelevant.  When information is scarce, which is a common occurrence, System 1 operations as a machine for jumping to conclusions."

"The combination of a coherence-seeking System 1 with a lazy System 2 implies that System 2 will endorse many intuitive beliefs..."

Norovirus Interruption
While reading Thinking, Fast and Slow, I caught the norovirus that took out three co-workers and me in one day.  I have since recovered, but the book is due back at the library and with a 400+ waiting list, not something that I can renew.

That said, I did not finish this book, but would like to so plan to return the book and request it again. 

Go Put Your Strengths to Work by Marcus Buckingham, 2007

Elevator Pitch Summary: This book provides an idealist way to think about your job.  Often, there is an emphasis on improving weaknesses in the workplace, but Buckingham argues that strengths make people unique and that allowing people to utilize their strengths in the workplace will not only ensure maximum contribution, but also ensure happy employees.

Read this if you're in the mood for: Thinking about your career, whether you're exploring different opportunities or wondering about that elusive "perfect job".  Even if you are content with your current position, it is always beneficial to look at things from another point of view.

Ultimately, this book may frustrate you as you realize that only in an ideal world with an ideal job with an idea manager with an ideal alignment of the planets (you get the point...this is a consultant speaking after all), will you have the opportunity to fully utilize your strengths.

Staying true to the subtitle of the book, which is Six Powerful Steps to Achieving Outstanding Performance, this book reads like a six week training course where each chapter represents a week of assignments since just reading a book (or, blogging about it) will not change your situation - only focused execution will do so.

This makes the "course" more manageable and provides you more time to really consider your true strengths and how often these strengths are being utilized.

Refreshingly, The Point Is Not To Change
Unlike other books providing advice, Go Put Your Strengths to Work does not try to change you.  Rather, the book acknowledges that as you grow, you become more of who you already are and attempting to change this is not a productive use of energy or effort.

Similar to Betheny Frankel's distaste of the word "should" since it represents "Normal" noise, Buckingham states that "[s]hould-ing is a by-product of our cultural obsession with being well rounded and the prevailing corporate demand that we capitalize on our so-called areas of opportunity."

Instead, we should focus on recognizing our strengths and weaknesses, taking ownership to communicate these strengths and weaknesses, and creating a plan to maximize strengths and downplay weaknesses.

And, if you tend to be aware of others who are stronger at your strengths like I am, "...what of it?" Buckingham asks.  "You can't control how good someone else is, and you can't control what anyone else thinks of you."  So, get over it.

Know Thyself
The secret to a better you, whether personally or professionally, is that you have to work at it.  Self-awareness is only part of the equation - most people have a general idea of their strengths and weaknesses, but serious thought is needed to precisely identify true strengths and weaknesses. 

Buckingham provides good instructions on getting at these truths with the three C's - capture, clarify and confirm.  Following his instructions, which accounted for one week of the six week program, I was able to identify and detail my core strengths.

(And, I am sure I would have been able to do the same for my weaknesses if I had stuck to the program...  Not surprisingly, one of my weaknesses is impatience for results.)

The exercises are quite eye-opening.  Like everything else, true strengths and weaknesses are determined based on how they make you feel.  For example, you may be highly skilled at balancing accounting statements, but if it does not make you feel empowered or excited, what's the point?

Merely being good at something is not good enough when it comes to fulfillment.  Buckingham defines true strengths as things that make you feel strong, powerful, passionate, enthusiastic, and confident.  These are a lot of feelings to ask for and that's why you really need to consider what your true strengths are.

Likewise for weaknesses, weaknesses are not just things that you are not good at, but things that makes you feel weak, frustrated, drained, and despondent. 

It's Always About Communication
After the thoughtful part of knowing thyself and working through your feelings, comes the universal challenge of communication.

"To reach outstanding levels of performance, you must stop tiptoeing.  You must learn how to express - using unambiguous words and examples - what strengthens you and what weakens you."  You must be able to communicate strengths without bragging and weaknesses without whining.

The art of expressing oneself using "unambiguous words and examples" is actually a useful art that should be applied to every aspect of your life.

According to Buckingham, "[s]o if you find yourself thinking "My manager just doesn't understand me," the best advice is to get over it.  She'll never truly understand you.

The burden falls on you to understand yourself in as much detail as possible, so that you can then go to her and describe vividly which activities and situations will draw the best out of you, and which won't."

Similar to when you find yourself upset that your boyfriend or family do not understand you, you need to realize that it is your job to understand yourself and be able to communicate and provide instructions for how others are to understand you.

Strengths and Weaknesses Tools
Tools to discovery your strengths and weaknesses include simple observation exercises and sets of interview questions with clever titles such as: FREE (Focus, Release, Educate, Expand) and STOP (Stop, Team Up, Offer Up, Perceive).

These interview questions are designed to guide you in determining solutions to FREE up your time to spend on your strengths and STOP spinning your wheels on tasks that weaken you.

Part of change includes reviewing the initial impetus for change every few months and recalibrating if necessary.  Buckingham provides a measurement tool so that you can track and measure progress as you work on putting your strengths to work, but a unique code is required to access the tool online.

Unfortunately, one of the weaknesses of a library book is that the unique code will most likely be used up by the time the book reaches you.

For those who do not possess a lot of work experience or are in a midst of a career change and trying to determine what their strengths are, there is an online strengths assessment test that is part of the book.  If you are reading a library book like I did, a unique, one-time use access code is required and can be purchased here - http://www.strengthstest.com/strengths-tests/strengthsfinder-20-access-code.html.

One of many of Peter Drucker's works.

The Strengths Movement
This book builds upon Peter Drucker's 1966 The Effective Executive, which describes an effective executive as someone who builds on strengths - one's own strengths as well as the strengths of superiors, colleagues, subordinate.

The premise of the movement is that a person or organization will excel only by amplifying strengths and not by fixing weaknesses. 

Yet, people and corporation focus on improving weaknesses at least once a year during performance reviews.

This will prove to be a fruitless effort as underlying personalities do not change so if something weakens you and you just don't like doing it, you may get better at it, but you will not excel at it.

Another interesting way to view strengths and weaknesses is to look at the relationship between success and failure.  Success and failure are not opposites so looking at failures for lessons learned will not help to achieve success.  You need to study success to learn about success.

Similarly, looking at and improving weaknesses will not lead to increasing your strengths.

Not So Good As A Library Book
As mentioned earlier, this book does not work that well as a library book since the self-assessment test that is part of this book require a unique code to access.  As part of the TMBC empire though, you can purchase an access code. 

(Buckingham knows how to make a buck.  He has founded The Marcus Buckingham Company that offers consulting, tests, etc. services.  Even his book has messages throughout that point you to his online services, the majority of which require an access fee.  It's a bit of a hard sell, which I found off-putting.)

However, if you have enough work experience and self-awareness to have a good idea of what your strengths are, you do not need the online assessment test.