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.

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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 you can’t blame them for your personality.  What is it …

 
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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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 …

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What’s right with you?  If somebody asks you, what’s wrong with you, you might have a quick list of weaknesses you can rattle off.  But if they ask what’s right with you, can you rattle off a list of your strengths?  Chances are, you might have a fuzzy idea about your strengths, but you might not have a label for them.  In Go Put Your Strengths to Work: 6 Powerful Steps to Achieve Outstanding Performance, Marcus Buckingham writes about labeling what is right with things.    
Label What …

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How do you give your best where you have your best to give? You’re special. You’re an individual with a unique set of strengths, weaknesses, and experiences. Maybe only your closest friends know your true strengths. Maybe you don’t show your strengths at work. Why not? No matter what the task is, you can leave your mark. You have your signature strengths. Use them. In Go Put Your Strengths to Work: 6 Powerful Steps to Achieve Outstanding Performance, Marcus Buckingham writes about giving your …

Spend 75 percent of your time on your strengths and 25 percent on non-negotiables. If you’re like most people, you spend the majority of your time on activities that make you weak. Worse, these activities that make you weak, are interspersed throughout your day or throughout your week. Instead, put a time limit on how much time you will spend each day on activities that weaken you. It’s your timebox. Make this timebox a maximum of 25 percent of your day. Next, consolidate the activities to …

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Want to feel strong and alive each day?  Put your strengths to work.  You have some skills that just make you feel powerful and engaged.  They grow you.  You could spend all day doing these activities and still want more.  These skills come easy for you and you look forward to using them.  Maybe you don’t know what they are yet, but you just notice that some days feel better than others.  Then there’s the activities that drag you down.  They make you weak.  Just the thought …

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What are your best abilities?   Not just what are you good at, but what are your core strengths that run deep.  These are the activities where your passion, your talent, and your ability collide.  The more you do, the stronger you get, the more jazzed you feel, and the more you grow.   Do you know your own strengths?  Many people don’t.  They’re too busy trying to fix their weaknesses.   In Go Put Your Strengths to Work: 6 Powerful Steps to Achieve Outstanding Performance, Marcus Buckingham writes about …

Want to lead a life of strength?  Well, what holds you back?  Chances are … you do.  You’ve been trained to focus on your weaknesses.  At school, it’s not how many you got right.  It’s how many you got wrong.  At work, chances are you spend more time fixing your weaknesses than growing your strengths.  Want to make the shift?  Well, you need to know how to bust your myths.  In Go Put Your Strengths to Work: 6 Powerful Steps to Achieve Outstanding Performance, Marcus …

Does fear stop you from becoming your best?  Is fear an obstacle to building on your strengths?  Our fear of weaknesses can overshadow our confidence in our strengths.  Our fear of failure can stop us from giving our all.  The ultimate fear that can hold us back is fear of who we really are.  In the book, Now, Discover Your Strengths, Marcus Buckingham and Donald O. Clifton, Ph.D., teach us about the fears that limit your potential.
Key Take Aways Here are my key …

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How can you make your best contribution at work?  Play to your strengths.   The sooner you move to your strengths, the sooner you improve your contribution.   Find your strengths and offer them to your team.  It’s how to be your best.  It’s how you’ll feel stronger each day.  In Go Put Your Strengths to Work: 6 Powerful Steps to Achieve Outstanding Performance, Marcus Buckingham writes about volunteering your strengths to your team.
A Good Team Member Volunteers Their Strengths to the Team Most of the Time
Buckingham writes that good …

Are you a part of the strengths movement?  The strengths movement is a shift from focusing on weaknesses to focusing on strengths.  The idea is that you’ll gain more by improving your strengths than improving your weaknesses. In Go Put Your Strengths to Work: 6 Powerful Steps to Achieve Outstanding Performance, Marcus Buckingham traces the source of the strengths movement.
Key Take Aways Here’s my key take aways:

Focus on strengths.  Strengths are the key.  Focus on strengths over weaknesses.
Strengths are building momentum.  The …

What are your key strengths?  What are your talents that come easy for you, but are difficult for others?  Are you fully leveraging your unique combination of strengths?  If you know your unique combination of strengths, and you play to your strengths versus focusing on your weaknesses, you can amplify your results.  One of the key things that can hold you back is spending too much focus on your weaknesses and not on your strengths.  The better you know your strengths and talents, the better you can pick the right …

How do you build a team that trusts each other to speak their mind and take risks?  How do you make it possible for the team to engage in passionate and sometimes emotional debate, knowing that they will not be punished for saying something that might otherwise be interpreted as destructive or critical?  It’s not about trusting that your team members will behave in a certain way.  It’s about building vulnerability-based trust, where it’s safe to take risks and face conflict on the team rather than fear it.  In The …