Monetize Your Futuristic Strength

“Wouldn’t it be great if . . .” is this the question that you often ask as you view what the future might hold, and this picture keeps pulling you toward the future.

People with the Futuristic ® strength love to look across the horizon. As dreamers, they are fascinated and energized by the future, and they have great imaginations. I wouldn’t be surprised if George Lucas, the legendary Star Wars inventor and movie producer, was a Futurist. Futurists are all about possibilities.

One of my Futuristic clients makes a living as a career coach for teenagers going into college. She is gifted at helping children find their niche in the career world. Because she is the type of person that loves to dream and look to tomorrow, she is an incredible career coach.

Some people with the Futuristic strength are gifted at making predictions in business or the stock market. Futuristic speakers are individuals whose imaginations can go “where no man has gone before.” Futurist individuals can communicate and share predictions. They are often drawn to the fields of science and technology because both fields are continuously evolving.

My client, Michael is monetizing his Futuristic strength as a millennial CEO who has formed a virtual reality software company. He dreamed of being a millionaire by the age of twenty-five, and he did it! As a teenager, Michael was able to see the bull market for Bitcoin, a decentralized digital currency that enables instant payments to anyone. He wisely invested and is now able to fund the growth of his company using Bitcoin. If you or I had invested just $1,000 in Bitcoin the year it was first publicly available, you would now be richer to the tune of $36.7 million.

Marie Curie was a brilliant scientist during a time when the words woman and scientist didn’t go together. Curie was the first female professor at the Sorbonne in Paris and the first female Nobel laureate ever. Along with her husband, physicist Pierre Curie, she was awarded half of the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1903 for their work in spontaneous radiation (the other half went to Henri Becquerel for discovering it). She was also the only person ever to receive two Nobels in two different scientific categories — she won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1911, also for her work in radioactivity. Between 1903 and 1923, she went on to earn seven (7) more prestigious awards for her work.

Her early research that she worked on with her husband was often done under challenging conditions, laboratory arrangements were meager, and both had to undertake a considerable amount of teaching to earn a livelihood. The Curies conducted the majority of their research and experimentation which led to their discovery of the elements Radium and Polonium in a laboratory that was described by the respected German chemist, Wilhelm Ostwald, as “a cross between a stable and a potato shed.” When Ostwald was first shown the premises, he assumed that it was “a practical joke.”

Soon after Marie received her second Nobel Prize in 1911, two laboratories were constructed at Sorbonne. In one of the laboratories, Marie led a team of researchers analyzing radioactivity, while the other laboratory was used to explore possible cancer treatments. Her forward-looking research had taken a long way from the meager laboratories where she started.

Curie’s contribution during the First World War was praiseworthy. Knowing the need of the time, she sought to provide relief to those injured on the battlefield. She developed portable radiology units that would assist field surgeons. She made hollow needles containing radon that could be used for sterilization. Thanks to her effort, the lives of many soldiers could be saved. Due to her eye on the future, there are discoveries she made that help keep you and me alive today.

Futuristic people often stay in their heads and therefore need someone with the Activator strength to help them follow through with current ideas, goals, and dreams.

Does the future fascinate and energize you? Are you a dreamer who sees visions of what could be and who values those visions? You can energize others, too. Your pictures can raise their sights and thereby their spirits. You can paint pictures of the future for them. Make the picture as rich as you possibly can, and people will want to be part of the hope you bring.

Could you monetize your Futuristic strength in technology, medicine, or a service business? Do you see a future to save lives and make a better world like Marie Curie ?  Let’s have a conversation about monetizing your Futuristic strength in the comments below.

Not sure where you are and need some conversation around that. Remember you can schedule your Ask Brent Anything call. Let’s talk about strengths.

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Monetize Your Context Strength

Does your organization have someone who is the resident historian? Do you enjoy all the details of past decisions and fill everyone in on those to avoid pitfalls for the future? How can you monetize the strength of Context®? 

Context is a unique strength in which people’s brains look backwards in order see forwards. Contextual individuals feel that the present moment is connected to the past. They feel more alive when looking at history—the history of mankind, the history of a relationship, the history of success.

Contextual individuals relate and devise plans by looking at the past. I have a couple of different clients with this particular strength. One is a therapist who monetizes her Context by asking questions about where clients grew up and what their experiences were. The more she learns about a person’s history, the more it helps her relate to the individual in the present.

My other client is a person who honors the past. He loves reflecting on his childhood, which he looks upon as the best, most successful, most enjoyable time in his life. In fact, he is struggling to adapt to his adult life and his mind sometimes fixates on his childhood because it’s the time when he felt the most successful.

One of the things that we decided to do together to help him deal with his present was to create a special room—kind of like a “man cave”— in his house. This room is separate from his wife and kids, and it’s filled with memorabilia and items from his childhood. He also filled it with items representing his present interests—historical reenactments of Bonnie and Clyde, vintage clothes, cars, weapons, and books on the history of the 1930’s. His daily time in this room working on crafts and hobbies energizes him because he surrounds himself with positive history.

People who have the strength of Context typically love case studies. They enjoy taking a real person or civilization from the past and exploring. If you give them Rome, they want to know what caused it to rise and fall, as well as everything that happened along the way.

Howard Carter was a British archaeologist and Egyptologist who became world-famous and wealthy after discovering the intact tomb of the 18th Dynasty Pharaoh, Tutankhamun, in November 1922.

Carter spent much of his childhood with relatives in the Norfolk market town of Swaffham. Nearby was the mansion of the Amherst family, Didlington Hall, containing a sizable collection of Egyptian antiques, which sparked Carter’s interest in that subject.

He began working in archeology in 1891 at the age of 17.  In 1907, Lord Carnarvon employed him to supervise excavations of nobles’ tombs near Thebes.  (Though you may not be familiar with Lord Carnarvon’s name you may be familiar with his family home.  His country house, Highclere Castle, serves as the filming location of the ITV/PBS television series Downton Abbey)

By 1922, Lord Carnarvon had become dissatisfied with the lack of results after several years of finding little. He informed Carter that he had one more season of funding to make a significant find in the Valley of the Kings.  It looked like Carter’s time was over but he pushed on.

On 4 November 1922, their young water boy accidentally stumbled on a stone that turned out to be the top of a flight of steps cut into the bedrock. Carter had the steps partially dug out until the top of a mud-plastered doorway was found. The doorway was stamped with indistinct cartouches (oval seals with hieroglyphic writing).

On 26 November 1922, Carter made a “tiny breach in the top left-hand corner” of the doorway, with Carnarvon, his daughter Lady Evelyn Herbert, and others in attendance, using a chisel that his grandmother had given him for his 17th birthday. He was able to peer in by the light of a candle and see that many of the gold and ebony treasures were still in place. He did not yet know whether it was “a tomb or merely an old cache”, but he did see a promising sealed doorway between two sentinel statues. Carnarvon asked, “Can you see anything?” Carter replied with the famous words: “Yes, wonderful things!”  Carter had, in fact, discovered Tutankhamun’s tomb.

Often, they take the information gathered and use it to help their business. Contextual people are not “Deja vu” people, they are “vuja de” people. Vuja de helps us understand the past and how the past affects the future. The Contextual individual’s mindset is focused on understanding the past in order to make the present and future better.

How could you monetize your Context strength?  What career could you enjoy with your Context strength like Howard Carter?  Let’s have a conversation.

Remember you can schedule your Ask Brent Anything call. Let’s talk about strengths.

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