Such as this article by Jim Taylor, Ph.D., who is a clinical associate professor at the University of Denver.

http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-power-prime/201201/personal-growth-know-thyself-is-the-first-step-life-change

Most people love to talk about their strengths, but don't like to admit that they have weaknesses. I disagree with Marcus Buckingham, the co-author of Now, Discover Your Strengths, who asserts that the way to achieve goals is to focus on your strengths. This approach may work for some parts of your life, for example, a job that involves one or two highly specialized skill sets, such as an accountant or a computer programmer. But most aspects of life require a constellation of competencies, so the "focus on your strengths" model will actually limit your ability to make substantial changes in your life.

Think of your strengths and weaknesses for getting promoted in a new job in, say, banking, as a mathematical equation. On a scale of one to ten, where 1 is very poor and 10 is the best, if you have very good financial analysis skills (8), but you are quite poor at relationship building (2), then your over-all performance would be moderate (8+2=10 out of a possible 20). If you focused on and improve your analytical capabilities (say, from 8 to 9), you wouldn't improve that much over all because you were already capable in that area of your work (9+2=11). But if you improve your relationship skills (say, from 2 to 6), then your over-all performance would rise significantly (8+6=14). Of course, you want to continue to build your strengths, but the more you improve your weaknesses, the better you'll be able to make the changes you want.

Then there was this post by Marc Andreessen where he talked about career planning, he said to focus on continuously developing and broadening your base of skills. He cites 5 skills as examples: communication, management, sales, finance and international.

http://pmarca-archive.posterous.com/the-pmarca-guide-to-career-planning-part-2-sk

Anybody have thoughts on talents, strengths, building skills and how one should go about it ?