In addition to Dan Miller’s 48 Days to the Work You Love, which covers discovering your strengths, the DISC profile is helpful as well to figure out where you innate abilities lie.

Another great book is Max Lucado’s Cure for the Common Life. His five step formula for determining your life’s “Story” and finding your sweet spot is a great exercise in awareness raising. His acronym S.T.O.R.Y. stands for the following:
Strengths. What is it you just can’t not do? What is so easy for you that you can’t believe others can’t do it just as easily?
Topic. What do you enjoy working with? People, information, numbers, systems, communication, etc.
Optimal conditions. What makes your trigger pop? Routine? Emergencies? Responding to a need? Solving problems? Working in an office, at the beach, in a large corporation of small?
Relationships. What kind of relationships are taking place? Teams? Individual? Small or large groups? Leading, assisting or following?
Yes! What are those moments in your life where all of these converge and you are working so deeply in your zone-your personal sweet spot-that time just disappears?

This journey of discovering who you are and what makes you tick can take some time, effort and a real honest look at yourself, but is well, well worth it. Read a book, take a test, hire a coach. Do whatever it takes to discover your strengths!

What I’ve found in my six years at my current company, it was a strength but it just needed more attention and practice as well as better coaching. Today, I am presenting in multiple meetings a week, run Chalk Talk like training on complex systems for end users and put together executive summaries. Through practice, I’ve benefited from the multiplicative effect and it has done wonders for my career.

I use my top 5 strengths every day: Restorative, Communication, Consistency, Harmony, and Input. Understanding these for myself helps me leverage these and I get great energy through my work. My career has been rewarding as a result of never loosing sight of the strengths and working in an environment that’s conducive to that approach.

As to people having jobs they feel passionate about – I believe this is possible. If we only sit down and think what is we feel passionate about, can we change something and what. Also lucky that we are all passionate about different things.

I shudder to think what the world could accomplish if we *all* actually worked as hard as we could for 40 hours a week.

My wife’s former employer didn’t require 90% of the people to be to work at a set time every day.

I’m not lazy and I don’t lack respect for other people’s time, it just happens sometimes. It’s a glitch sometimes and I can’t plan for something so random and odd. For me, it’s a minor thing that happens occassionally but in this wide world of billions of people I’m sure there are plenty of people out there who are way worse than me. It’s not inconcievable and it may not be entirely under their control.

However, a better example may be someone who is deathly afraid of public speaking or who can’t spell to save their life.

And since you ask, I’ve had almost exclusively scheduled-to-the-minute jobs. And that’s how I like it. There are plenty of people with advanced, high-end jobs for whom following the schedule is vital. My mother is a doctor – she has to be there when she has a patient at 8. My husband is a college professor – he has to be there when his class starts, for office hours, when a student needs to meet with him. At my last job, management had fairly flexible hours, and trust me, everyone noticed the managers who showed up later.

…I was forced to do it at work. At least I didn’t have to pay for the book.

I got out of sales, and I usually explain it by the emotional impact: I’m good at sales but I find it really draining and tiring, so I am moving into something less emotionally taxing.

Because as far as I can tell, EVERYONE hates having to be at work by a certain number of minutes after a set time. Nobody stays in those jobs long. It means you’re being judged on something that has very little to do with performance, and I know a lot of people who have quit because all the boss cared about was what time you got there in the morning and not how much work you get done. People really love managing their own hours, it’s one of the benefits of moving up the ladder.

But either way: why spend all your self discipline on something that doesn’t matter at ALL in lots of jobs, instead of just finding something that suits the way you already are?

So maybe the caveat is play to the strengths you want to play to (as long as you know what they are, of course!).

I do appreciate the nuance she put at the end- that he did get better, and needed to, etc.- and I also appreciate that she used a real life example. It’s just that, the whole time I was reading, I kept thinking “I’m sorry, but wow, I just can’t believe an adult behaves that way!”. As a previous commenter said, if he had mouths to feed I’m sure he would get over his “weakness” pretty soon. I also think that this kind of “weakness” is not on par with, say, not being a morning person or not being a people person, or not being good with numbers. Honestly, it seems childish, selfish, and a bit lazy to simply throw one’s hands up and say “oops, I can’t be on time!”. Truly, hours late sometimes?? I’m just shaking my head and laughing at bit at how absurd that is, haha.

But I can’t help but think of lots of people who refuse to do the boring bits of the job and consider themselves more “the management type.” They shuffle off the unpleasant tasks on other co-workers.