Everyone’s talents are unique.
Flow is the overlap between peak performance and joy in practicing one’s talents.
Focusing on a few key strength areas can make a profound difference.
These are good reasons to write a strength statement, not an easy exercise but definitely worth it.
Strength statements are your talents manifest. Unique to you but can be used over and over again; a description of you in flow.
If I only had one strength statement, it would be;
I love helping people loosen the mental knot
Hopefully this tells you about me; I love to think, I love to learn, I love translating what I know into your context in such a way that you come up with a few powerful ideas.
As someone once said to me; ‘Everything that didn’t matter dissipated until I could see clearly’. That is very rewarding to me.
Someone I work with, Jen, created a strength statement for herself;
I use energy efficiently to stimulate the building of momentum to overcome challenges.
I think we all resonate with this one, either because we welcome and appreciate it in others or we aspire to have it in ourselves or both.
I’ve also heard Jen say many a time, ‘time to rip off the bandage’.
Then it clicked.
In physics, Power is the rate at which energy is transferred, used or transformed. Energy transfer can be used to do work, so Power is rate at which Work is performed.
Power = Work/Time
Imagine you do 100 units of work over 100 hours. Average power (1 unit/hour) may be so weak that people barely notice. Do the same work in 1 hour and your power is now 100 times greater, that’s packing quite a punch.
Your power output is 10X higher if you run a mile in 6 minutes versus walk it in an hour, even though you’re doing the same amount of work in both cases.
People notice power more than they notice work, that’s the power of Jen’s strength statement.
So then I looked at few more;
‘I love helping people go from confusion to clarity through dialogue’ (increase signal/noise ratio)
‘I love tuning an idea for a specific audience without losing any of the idea’s meaning’ (transponder)
‘I love it when my days are so filled with a range of challenging, impactful tasks that the only way to deliver on all of my responsibilities is to be so efficient and productive that not a single second of my day is wasted.’ (peak instantaneous power; friction-less energy transfer)
You’ll know a good strength statement when you see one and recognize the person’s unique talents and see what timeless positive force the strength is tapping into.
Knowing others is intelligence
Knowing yourself is true wisdom
Mastering others is strength
Mastering yourself is true power
– Lao Tzu
There is more in you
Engineering Peak Performance 
I like your analogy – hardly surprising for a physicist, though the reason may not be so apparent. I have long thought that scientists and artists, though often in disagreement, value the same things – truth, beauty, elegance, power, and the list goes on. We just see them in different ways. Analogy gives us a common language to express these values, which is why I like this post so much!