Following your through line

A big announcement

Of course, she was in her ‘Zoom clothes’ when she opened the box, but I think I captured the moment pretty well. The smile speaks volumes:)

I want to interrupt this Epiphanytide season to make a very important announcement…

It’s an exciting time in the Ellison household. My wife Alex (follow her Substack newsletter here) has been working for the last five years on a book with her colleague, Betsy Wills, that got picked up by Harper Collins Publishing and is being released (Jan. 21)!! We just got the hardcovers in the mail yesterday. It’s just so cool to see this thing finally come into the world.

The book is called Your Hidden Genius. It’s been fascinating to watch the trajectory of her career. 11 years ago, after working for a college counseling company in the San Francisco Bay Area, she set off on her own, working with clients in Reno when we lived there. Rory was a newborn. Alex’s boss was a tyrant who didn’t pay her maternity leave and treated her like garbage. So Alex cut the cord, so to speak, and started her own business. The only marketing she had was word of mouth, and her business has steadily grown over the years.

Her early clients went from high school to college and are now well into their careers. Alex has followed them along the way and now her business offers counseling on everything from college admissions to early career guidance and beyond.

The core of Alex’s work is aptitudes. These are our natural talents we develop very young and become second nature to us. Betsy, her co-author, is the co-founder of YouScience, the company that took aptitude assessment from an expensive multi-day in-person endeavor where you had to travel to an office for a proctored aptitude assessment (Johnson O’Connor was the pioneer in this and still does this work today) to an online assessment that you can take from home in your PJ’s. Alex has been using this YouScience assessment with her clients from the get-go.

Aptitudes are different than interests. Though interests are important, they're flighty. They change according to context, gender, etc. Aptitudes don’t really change. Case in point - one of the people Alex interviewed for the book (who has long been the White House usher) took the in-person Johnson O’Connor aptitude assessment decades ago. When Alex and Betsy had him take the YouScience assessment recently, his results were identical to his prior ones. Though his interests had changed, his aptitudes remained the same. In this way, our aptitudes tend to set like concrete very early in our lives.

A lot of counselors work from the other end. They find the most desired job or college and try to shape their clients to fit into those molds. Alex works the other way. She finds the ‘shape’ of her clients (by assessing their aptitudes) and aligns them with the career or the college that fits THEM. She sees a person’s God-given (my language) aptitudes/talents as their ‘through line’ (the name of her business is Throughline Guidance) that they can hold onto throughout their lives. Holding onto this talent thread in our lives leads us to enriching work and enjoyable hobbies and avocations. When we work from our gifts rather than our deficits, life becomes a heck of a lot more enjoyable and effortless. If not, you’re like a lefty trying like crazy to write with your right hand.

Discovering your aptitudes is a huge benefit no matter what line of work you’re in. The only thing is, you might discover you’re in a line of work that contradicts your aptitudes. But that’s okay! Because as long as you’re aware, you can move towards the things in any career that best fit your gifts.

Taking myself as an example, as a pastor, I’m in an abstract field that’s great for generalists. My work involves abstract spiritual concepts and it offers a lot of different things ‘to do’ (from preaching to crafting worship liturgy to providing spiritual care to administration to having the church toilet fixed when it leaks to community outreach, etc.). However, I’m a specialist, which means I love to get hyper-focused on one thing. I have a hard time managing everything. I’m also a spatial thinker rather than an abstract one. I’d be better off building things out of wood than writing textbooks. You’d think this would mean a career nightmare for me, but alas - it doesn’t! I just know that my focus needs to stay more on spatial and tactile endeavors like liturgy and curating the worship experience rather than conceptual abstract things. Because I’m a specialist, I need to delegate a lot of tasks to others. This awareness has helped me immensely in my short career so far.

Alex and I did a workshop at my church earlier last summer. She went over the on-the-ground practical aspects of aptitudes (we gave attendees the assessment beforehand), and I covered the theological and spiritual aspects of vocation (it turns out Martin Luther was BIG on vocation).

A big point here is that aptitude awareness can seem like something most beneficial to younger career-focused people. But here’s the thing… We’re living longer. The hope is that when we retire, we have plenty of life left. Older folks (which my church demographic largely consists of) often realize upon retirement that they didn’t particularly enjoy their careers. So what do they do with their time now that money isn’t an obstacle? What a great time for a fresh start! (Columnist David Brooks wrote at length about this here.) This is where aptitude awareness comes into play. Upon retirement, you still have time to spend. You might as well spend it on endeavors that fit the shape of… you. Whether you dig into a hobby, volunteer your time at a local organization, go to work part-time, or geek out on things you’ve always wanted to learn more about - knowing your aptitudes is a super worthwhile endeavor.

So… Of course… Here’s my shameless plug to buy the book!

It’s sooooo good!! And, a big selling point is, the book comes with a code you use to take your own aptitude assessment via YouScience FOR FREE!! Pre-orders really help and the book releases on Jan. 21.

And if this aptitude stuff sounds like something you want to know more about, well, I kinda know the author:) She might be willing to come onto a live Substack Q&A or something to answer your questions about this stuff. Let me know what you think in the comments below or by replying to the email this post comes in.