‘To be nobody but yourself when the world is trying its best night and day to make you somebody else is to fight the hardest battle any human will fight.’

So wrote the poet EE Cummings.

The quest for authenticity is high on the agenda among social philosophers today. Positive psychology has been in the ascendant for at least two decades now (and rightly so, in my view), while the search for ‘Happiness’ has been making headlines and selling books at an unprecedented rate.

But what exactly did Cummings mean when he wrote that ‘the world’ was trying night and day to make us ’somebody else’?

In their book Don’t Waste Your Talent, Dr Bob McDonald and Don Hutcheson described many of us being trapped in ‘the lemming conspiracy’ (Tal Ben Shahar in Happier calls it ‘the Rat Race’). They describe us as having two selves - our ‘true selves’ and our ’system selves’. The pull of the Lemming Conspiracy makes us lose our True Self and replace it with our System Self. This is turn sucks us into a ’stress cycle’ which feeds off itself, taking us further and further away from our True Self.

The question is - how can we escape the pull of our System Self?

McDonald and Hutcheson advocate renewing the systems around us, by going through an eight-step process. One of these steps includes identifying our talents.

Recent studies conducted by Gallup have found that only 18% of the people in the global workforce agree with the statement that ‘they get the opportunity to do what they do best every day’.

The upshot of this is that most of us are in jobs that do not use our talents - and are essentially willing to place our ’system self’ before our ‘true self’. Identifying and using our talents is central to the experience of living our True Selves, since most of us will spend most of our lives at work. Yet so many of us are unaware of our talents, how to discover them, and how to use them.

What the System taught us

This goes back to our time at school. Learning, growth, progress - that was a process of gaining knowledge and some skills, and passing a bunch of exams. Many of us were already in the grip of the Lemming Conspiracy then, when somehow we came to believe that better grades made us a better person.

The System reinforces this when companies hire based on qualifications (as opposed to talent, or natural abilities) and assume that this correlates with performance. In spite of overwhelming evidence that it does not, many companies continue with this practice.

And, in spite of overwhelming evidence that learning without reference to the learner’s innate abilities (created by their hardwiring or synaptic connections pretty much fully-formed by the time we reach our mid-teens) is unproductive, too many schools and curricula continue in this way.

The Empire strikes back

I’m amazed at how many people are unaware of the above. Even Peter Drucker, writing forty years ago, was taken aback when he wrote that ‘Most people think they know what they are good at… they are usually wrong’, and ‘Most Americans do not know what their strengths are. When you ask them, they look at you with a blank stare, or they respond in terms of subject knowledge, which is the wrong answer.’

The practice of people working in jobs that do not give them the opportunity to do what they do best is bad business both for the individual and the company. The individual gets demotivated and disengaged (as studies have shown) and the company gets significantly lower levels of productivity… yet both soldier along without really addressing or recognising this sorry state of affairs.

It is akin to buying a DVD player, and using it to wash the dishes. Not good for the DVD player, and not good for the owner either!

So what can you do to rediscover your True Self in the midst of this institutionalised stupidity?

The first recommendation I would make is to discover your talents in a structured, scientific way using the Highlands Ability Battery ( contact us here for more details ).

Once you have done so, you can zero in on those tasks that use your talents and reduce those that do not. This is essential as the work experience takes up most of our lives.

Don’t Waste Your Talent has some great exercises to reconnect your True Self to supportive (rather than destructive) systems which include anchoring the change with your family.

The central point made by Hutcheson and McDonald is that change can only happen if we work at the systems all around us. As EE Cummings wrote, the world is pulling us away from our true selves. By discovering our talents we can start the process where we can allow it to pull us towards them.