1. Why this book: I had invited the author Rich Diviney to be a guest speaker on the Mental Performance Working Group that I host to discuss his work on The Attributes. Naturally, I thought it would be good for me to read his book first. 

Summary in 3 sentences. Rich Diviney developed the idea of attributes as a means of better selecting candidates for intensive SEAL training, after realizing that assessing for skills was not useful -skills could be taught; he realized that they were actually selecting for attributes which are more innate and determine how a person will react to uncertainty, challenge, and stress.  He and his team were looking for attributes that indicate how a person will perform in uncertain, challenging, stressful environments, often with little warning or time to prepare, and perhaps with little previous experience.  He discusses each of 25 attributes which he breaks down into five categories: Grit, Mental Acuity,  Drive, Leadership and Teamability and offers advice on how a person might  develop attributes, as well as how to use attributes to make oneself and one’s organization stronger.  

My impression:  Really fascinating and well written book.  Easy and enjoyable to read, and a fascinating new concept for selecting, assessing, personnel for hiring and for promotion.  There is a lot of content – each of 25 attributes gets about7-10 pages which flow quickly and easily as he provides fascinating examples from his and other people’s experience to explain each one. I started losing track of attributes after getting thru the first 10 or so – and felt that each attribute could almost justify a whole discussion; but Rich’s intention was to introduce the concept and get the discussion going. 

He discusses the difference between Skills and Attributes:

• Skills In short,  can be taught, like driving, shooting, accounting, language, climbing etc.
• Attributes are more inherent.  People have different base-line strengths and weaknesses in their attributes, but with intention a person can develop their  attributes.  Kinda like athleticism or humor- everybody has some, some are stronger/more gifted than others, and everyone can get better. Attributes for Diviney are those qualities that inform a person’s behavior under conditions of Uncertainty, Challenge, and Stress.

He discusses the difference between Peak and Optimal Performance.  

• Peak performance is the apogee of one’s very best performance, and one can prepare for peak performance,  by targeting one’s preparations to perform at one’s best during a specific time window under specific conditions;
• Optimal performance means doing the best one can, with whatever one has,  whenever called upon, and under whatever conditions may present themselves. 

The SEAL Teams and other first responders need to select for those with attributes that support primarily “optimal” performance. Peak performance is more applicable to athletic competitions or other performances under predictable conditions.

Attributes for selection?  He described how he and his team working with the selection and assessment team at a SEAL Team, came up with the idea of focusing on attributes. He and his team realized that they were testing candidates under conditions of Uncertainty Challenge and Stress to identify whether a candidate had the baseline attributes adequate to make that person a good candidate for the work they are being selected for, to include capacity to learn the necessary skills.  They realized that a candidate’s skills were not nearly as relevant as their attributes They sat down started listing those attributes that they needed.

 For The Attributes, he distilled several long lists of attributes down to 25 attributes, which serve as a taxonomy for his book. He broke 22 of those attributes into FIVE broad categories: Grit, Mental Acuity, Drive, Leadership, and Teamability. His book is divided into sections – one for each of these categories, and each section devotes a chapter to describe and explain each attributes within that broad category.

• Grit –  which includes the attributes of Courage,  Perseverance, Adaptability, Resilience – and he does reference Angela Duckworth’s work.
• Mental Acuity – which includes the attributes of Situational Awareness, Compartmentalization, Task Switching, Learnability 
• Drive – which includes the attributes of Self-efficacy, Discipline, Open Mindedness, Cunning, Narcissism (as a positive, vice negative attribute).  
• Leadership –  which includes the attributes of Empathy, Selflessness, Authenticity, Decisiveness, Accountability
• Teamability – which includes the attributes of Integrity, Conscientiousness, Humility, and Humor.

Three other 3 attributes which he describes and which he argues don’t fit into  any of his  5 categories are: Patience/impatience, Fear/insouciance, Competitiveness/non-competitiveness. 

Though inherent in  “who we are,”  one’s attributes are malleable and can be developed, but not as easy as skills.  Attribute development must be self-directed and deliberate and with conscious effort.  It takes work.    Attributes  have to be seen in different contexts to be understood and assessed. 

To give an example of one of the five categories, Mental Acuity, here’s a bit more detail:

MENTAL ACCUITY refers to how the brain functions and how it processes the world. He got a considerable amount of help from Neuroscientist Andrew Huberman in exploring and describing the attributes under “mental acuity.”   In fact you can view a discussion between Rich and Andrew about the book on Youtube) All four of the mental acuity attributes are inter-related and all work together and in part, depend on each other.

• Situational Awareness – this is noticing one’s environment and includes “vigilance,” People strong in Situational Awareness notice more things than others. They notice A LOT. Bringing information from the environment into the mind.
• Compartmentalization – organizes the information that we are noticing with our Situational Awareness.   Compartmentalizing focuses, organizes and prioritizes what matters most and what doesn’t, in what our senses are perceiving.
• Task Switching – ability to shift focus among tasks back and forth. Shifting focus from one activity to another. Ability to do this quickly and efficiently measures our Task Switching attribute. Task switching costs the brain energy. Ease and efficiency are important. Multi-tasking is a myth.
• Learnability – neural plasticity – learning to apply new neural networks to new situations. How easy or difficult it is for a person to learn, absorb new information, and use it. 

Rich argues that the Mental Acuity attributes are more interconnected than those in any of the other categories because they are so dependent on the brain,  which functions as an interconnected system. 

A couple of additional interesting pieces that I found in this book:

Empathy (part of Leadership)- like most attributes, it can’t be developed in a classroom. One can learn “about” it, but it requires deliberate work and effort and intentionality to develop it.

Humor (part of Teamability) is a neurological hack into perseverance and courage.  Humor and laughter (jokes)  inundate our brains w dopamine and endorphins.   All high performing teams he argues, have a “class clown.”

Narcissism -(an attribute of Drive) Though normally a pejorative term,  Rich insists that a healthy degree of narcissism is a powerful motivator – it motivates people to work hard, take on new challenges, become the person they are proud of being.   

Self designation He notes that in several of the attributes it is not legitimate to self-designate, or judge oneself in that attribute. Wheras one can, with some degree of subjective accuracy designate oneself as having a high degree of situational awareness, or accountability, but one cannot designate oneself with any real credibility as a strong leader, or a good teammate,or a humorous person. Others must designate you and grade you on those attributes. 

Balancing Attributes – Almost all attributes can be taken to excess – narcissism comes to mind – but to be healthy, they need to be balanced with other attributes (eg humility for narcissism).  Too much compartmentalization and a person loses situational awareness. Too much situational awareness can lead to hyper-vigilance and anxiety.  

Which are the “real” attributes, or the best list?  Rich points out that his list is a distillation of what he and his SEAL team partners came up with for their needs.  He insists that each organization look at which attributes are most important for the positions in their organizations.  His list may be a good starting point.  Empathy for example, will be much more important for a nurse, or child care specialist,  than for a computer programer, or an auto mechanic. He encourages organizations to consider those most suited to their organization, and perhaps for different jobs in their organization and to hire more for attributes than skills, which can be taught.  Organizations which hire for attributes are playing the “long game.”

 Aristotle’s Virtues and Attributes: Those of you who know much about Aristotle’s Virtue Ethic will see parallels between Aristotle’s virtues and Diviney’s attributes.  They both are flexible, based on an individual’s natural proclivities, and they both seek a mean between excess and deficiency that is individual and context dependent.  Aristotle’s “proper pride” which he calls the lead virtue, because it motivates us to strive to achieve the others, is very similar to Diviney’s attribute of narcissism.  The key difference that I see is that Aristotle’s virtues are prescriptive and give guidance to an individual seeking to be the very best version of him/herself possible, given their genetics, family, social class, community, culture.   Diviney’s attributes are more descriptive as an attempt to understand a person as they are, as well as the requirements of a particular position.  Attributes point not to individual virtue in society as much as an individual’s fit for a particular context.  Diviney’s attributes are more practical tools to apply to solving selection and assessment problems than I believe Aristotle’s virtues would be.  

Diviney notes that a person can intentionally seek to develop certain attributes to better fit a role, but as soon as s/he is  trying to develop such attributes to become their ideal person, Aristotle provides guidance on how best to to that.  To become more courageous, do more things that require courage, to become more humorous, listen to and tell more jokes, seek opportunities to appreciate and exercise humor, to develop more perseverance, take on increasingly demanding tasks that require perseverance. That’s why Aristotle was called the common sense philosopher. 

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The Attributes is an interesting book with a valuable and insightful approach to assessing qualities of people for specific jobs. Though inspired by SEAL team selection and assessment, it is a tool that can be widely used in hiring, and in deciding promotion – by matching a person’s attributes to the requirements of their potential job.