Be strong all day long. Leverage four sources of strength by drawing strength from your mind, body, emotions, and spirit.

Martin Seligman named a set of 24 Signature Strengths. Marcus Buckingham and Donald O. Clifton, Ph.D. identified 34 key signature themes of strength. Use the language of strengths to find and share your character strengths and personal strengths with others.

“You do not merely want to be considered just the best of the best. You want to be considered the only ones who do what you do.” — Jerry Garcia

It’s a Darwin world. If you want to survive, or thrive, in a Darwin world, you have to play to your strengths. More than that though, you need to differentiate and specialize. Specialization is nature’s strategy for winning.

“Your willingness to wrestle with your demons will cause your angels to sing. Use the pain as fuel, as a reminder of your strength.” – August Wilson

As a parting gift at the end of one of my projects, I wanted everybody to walk away with their list of personal strengths. Not just a list that I made up, or their own list, but a list of strengths through the eyes of the team.

This post is an experiment on multiple levels. First, I’m testing how well I can get feedback on content for my book, by sharing content on my blog. Second, I’m testing how well I can share a techniques that’s easy for me to do live, but tough to write down. This is the same exercise I go through with my mentees at Microsoft to have more energy, have more fun, and get more done. It’s about spending more time in your strengths, and less time in your weaknesses.

I like learning the language around a given topic to build precision and depth. When you have a language for something, it helps you think, organize, and share knowledge more effectively. The same is true for strengths. Your strengths are among your greatest assets. Simply put, they help you give your best where you have your best to give. To find, study, and explore your strengths, you should know the language of strengths.

As I’ve been studying strengths and helping people find their super powers, I’ve realized that some of the strengths literature is very specific in describing strengths versus talents. What’s the difference between a strength and a talent? Simply put, a talent is your natural pattern for thinking, feeling or doing. It represents your potential. A strength, on the other hand, represents an ability that you’ve developed into a consistent, near-perfect performance.

In this post, I’ve collected the most significant data points I could find to help answer the question “Why strengths?” Simply put, you might just be the world’s next best, you name it, but we’ll never know. Why? … Because we don’t spend enough time in our strengths. Worse, very few of us even know what our strengths are.

If you’re not good at something, is it a weakness? If you’re good at something, is it a strength? No, it’s not that simple. There’s a difference between natural talents or strengths, and things that you learn over time by building skills and knowledge. There are many things that when you start out, you will be unskilled. That’s not a weakness. I’ll pause right there, to let that sink in. It’s a key concept when you’re trying to figure out your strengths and weaknesses.

Everybody has a super hero power (or at least I haven’t found anybody yet who doesn’t.) The funny thing is, not everybody knows what their super hero power is (or at least not off the top of their head.) The people that know their super hero power and use it, find work more rewarding and they get more rewards. Why? Because they are giving their best where they have their best to give. They stand out.

The 20 percent spike is a distinctive strength. It’s unusually powerful. Using your 20 percent spike generates exponential results. It’s a way to amplify your impact and maximize results. My 20 percent spike is information artistry. I use this skill to create, organize, and share complex information in a simple way. At work, it helps me write more effective books. At home, it helps me learn faster and turn insights into action. From a service standpoint, it helps me unleash the best in others.

I’ve been thinking of my life as a business. Without getting too carried away with the analogy – after all, life’s way more than business – it gives me a helpful frame, along with patterns and practices, to draw from. Rather than think of a business that makes money, I think of a business that creates value (the mark of an enduring business.) In this case, value for yourself and others.

Unleash a version of your best self — quickly find your purpose, values, and personal success patterns.

This is a follow up post to my previous post, Living Your Process. I’ve had enough folks ask me how to map out their success process that I’ll share some more prescriptive guidance. It’s a work in progress, but it’s enough to share for now. The big idea with living your process is that it helps you make the most of what you’ve got. It’s about living with passion and playing to your strengths. It’s also about living your values whether it’s at work or at play. It’s about knowing what fulfills you and what sparks you each day. It’s about living from the inside out and leading yourself first.

I’m a fan of “living your process.” To put it another way, this is about “approach over results.” Don’t get me wrong, I’m a fan of results. The problem is you can’t control all the events in your life or what happens to you. In life, you control your attitude and response … and it’s not what happens to you, but how you react.

Can you reconfigure your brain for empathy, competitiveness, or strategic thinking? Maybe. You might be fighting an uphill battle though. Your brain shrinks as you get older. As it shrinks, you get smarter. Your brain shapes around your key strengths. By the time you reach your mid-teens, your brain is mostly shaped. I think what this means is that you gain more by focusing on your strengths and playing to your strengths, than trying to improve your weaknesses. If you’ve got it, flaunt it.

“He who trims himself to suit everyone will soon whittle himself away.”  — Raymond Hull
Is your personality nature or nurture?  Studies consistently show 45 to 50 percent is nature.  The surprise though is that the other 50 percent is not nurture.  It’s not your birth order.  It’s not whether you were in day care.  Most surprisingly, 0 percent of the remaining 50 to 55 percent is  determined by how your parents raised you.
Don’t worry, you can still blame your parents for lots of specific aspects of your behavior, but …

 
Strengths and weaknesses are not the same as personality labels.  Personality profiles are your strongest patterns of thought, feeling, or behavior.  Strengths are those activities that you do well and have a natural passion and ability for.   The key is to go beyond any personality labels and identify your specific, real world activities that are your strengths and invest your time in those areas.  In Go Put Your Strengths to Work: 6 Powerful Steps to Achieve Outstanding Performance, Marcus Buckingham writes about going beyond personality profiles to identify your …

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Activities that are all appetite, no ability are hobbies. You might feel drawn to these activities.  You might even grow from them and feel good afterward.  But if you are not successful or effective, they are hobbies, not strengths. If you recognize the difference, you can move on to explore finding your strengths. You can still make time for your hobbies, but the key is to keep exploring your abilities until you find your true strengths.  That’s how you go from good to great. In Go …

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When an organization says people are its greatest asset, what they really means is their people’s strengths are their greatest asset.  When you focus on strengths you get the best results, whether its an individual, a team or an organization. If you focus on weaknesses, you bring yourself down, the team down and the organization down. If you’re not spending your time in your strengths, you’re not doing justice to yourself, your team or your organization. Your strengths are the organization’s most important assets. Your strengths …