While I'm sure most of my friends spent their first weekend of summer vacation partying like rockstars, I spent my Saturday night listening to a podcast by Marcus Buckingham, author of multiple books about discovering your strengths and being successful.
I first saw Buckingham on Oprah a few weeks ago. He had hosted a workshop for Oprah in which he talked about how we should play to our strengths and minimize our weaknesses. The workshop is available for download on iTunes.
The key point Buckingham made was play to your strengths, not your weaknesses. Once you do this, your world will tilt in that direction and everything else will fall away. Of course, there are some risks involved in playing to your strengths, but in the end it's worth it.
Buckingham said to ask yourself what your strengths are and how you will use them during the day when you get up in the morning.
In order to do this, you must know what strengths and weaknesses are.
According to Buckingham, strengths are things that you do well that excite you and you are passionate about. Weaknesses are activities you do that drain you. Sometimes one of your weaknesses could be an activity similar to a strength.
One way to discern if something is a strength or a weakness is how you feel when you do an activity. If time seems to stop when you do an activity, it is most likely a weakness. If times speeds up as you work, it is probably a strength.
For example, I am good at math, but math bores me and I'm tired when I complete it. Therefore, it is a weakness, not a strength. On the other hand, when I am writing, time moves a little faster and I am not exhausted when I am finished.
To keep track of their strengths and weaknesses, Buckingham had the people participating in the workshop keep a notepad in which they wrote down the activities they did all week. They labeled these activities as either strengths or weaknesses.
Surprisingly, Buckingham said that we should not fix our weaknesses. Instead, we should try to grow in our strengths because you will never be the greatest in areas you do not excel in. We should filter our weaknesses through our strengths in order to minimize them.
At the end of the day, you and those around you will benefit the most when you play to your strengths.
For more on this topic, click this link to the podcast: Take Control of Your Career and Your Life with Marcus Buckingham
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1 comment:
it is interesting that he doesn't want people to fix their weaknesses at all. slightly strange i think. because people are always trying to fix them anyway, and sometimes they are successful.
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