Tag: professional development

The best way to be successful is to find and focus on this one thing.

You have a valuable talent. Everyone does. You probably have more than one. But just being born with a valuable talent doesn’t make it valuable. Sorry, Charlie.

To unlock the value of your natural talent you need to do 3 things:

  1. You have to recognize what your valuable talent is.
  2. You have to develop that talent.
  3. You must find opportunities to put your talent to work where it creates value.

Valuable talents could be anything. Here is a non-exhaustive list to get your introspector introspecting.

  • Listening
  • Organizing
  • Remembering
  • Strategizing
  • Pruf Reeding
  • Creativity
  • Drawing Attention
  • Details
  • Humor
  • Caring
  • Impersonating Arron Neville.
  • Managing
  • Sales
  • Art
  • Picking Locks
  • Throwing Parties
  • Music
  • Teaching
  • Making Long Lists Less Boring To Read
  • Math
  • Words
  • Energy
  • Vision
  • Mechanics
  • Relationships
  • Looking good (This talent pairs well with all others)
  • Discovering talent in others

Key Takeaway

Don’t waste time trying to strengthen your weaknesses. That doesn’t unlock the kind of value that will make you highly successful. Instead, focus on your talents. Discover them. Develop them. Put yourself in situations where you can use them every day.

*If you know someone who could benefit from this message, please share it with them.

+For more of the best life lessons I have learned check out my book, What Does Your Fortune Cookie Say? from Ripples Media.

Why your experience is worthless until you do this important activity.

There is tremendous value in experience. People with a great deal of experience are typically paid more and command greater respect and authority. I expect that’s why Jimi Hendrix kept asking about it.

But the true value of experience does not come from the experience itself. After all, Elizabeth Taylor had a great deal of marriage experience thanks to her 8 trips down the aisle. And Nick Cannon has a great deal of parenting experience thanks to the 11 kids he’s sired with 6 different women. But few of us would turn to either of them for quality advice on marriage or parenting.

The true value comes not from the experience itself, but from the time we spend reflecting on the experience. It comes from the evaluation of what did and didn’t work. It comes from considering the constants, the variables, and through reflection, the results. (Although I have also found True Value in those cute neighborhood hardware stores.)

It’s your reflection that creates learning and understanding. That’s when the value is gained. You don’t need to have a good experience to learn and grow. In fact, you will often learn more from a bad experience. Because it is the evaluation process that alchemizes both good and bad experiences into valuable experiences. Which means the only experience your won’t profit from is the one you don’t examine.

My friend Anne Norman once called me a master of self-reflection. I was surprised to hear her evaluation. Although, once I reflected on her comment I recognized that I do indeed make self-reflection a priority. It is the engine that drives my self-improvement journey. It is my greatest entrepreneurial asset. It inspires my writing. And it helps me recognize when I have a bat in the cave.

Key Takeaway

Experience is not inherently valuable. Your evaluation of the experience creates the long-lasting value. Take time to reflect on your experiences to understand why you got the results you did. Repeat the actions and behaviors that contributed to good outcomes. Eliminate those that contributed to bad outcomes. That’s how you convert experience into wisdom. And applied wisdom creates the greatest value of all.

If you know someone who could benefit from this message, please share it with them.

+For more of the best life lessons I have learned check out my book, What Does Your Fortune Cookie Say? from Ripples Media.

How to benefit from the positive power of a bad boss.

I love the idea of having a mentor. In fact, I’d love to have a mentor as much as I’d love to have a beachfront mansion between Ricardo Montalbán and Magnum P.I. But I don’t own any oceanfront property, yet. And unfortunately, I don’t have an official mentor either.

To be fair, I do have a couple of sliver mentors. These are not people who teach me how to remove splinters. They are experts who I look to for insights and information about specific topics. But again, the relationships aren’t formal or consistent. So even my sliver mentors are unofficial and thinly used.

Anti-Mentors

However, I have had anti-mentors. These are bosses, leaders and managers who have shown me what not to do. They are people who set examples that I intuitively knew not to follow. (Mr. Lemming, maybe we shouldn’t jump off that cliff…) They are the types of leaders that are easy to complain about. But simply complaining about them means you are missing the value they provide.

Put Them To Work For You.

Instead of complaining about your supervisor, boss or otherwise-positioned anti-mentor, go to school on them. Study what they are doing wrong. Heck, write a book about them. Or write a song about them like Johnny Paycheck did. #TakeThisJobAndShoveIt

With everything you find wrong about your anti-mentor and his or her style, write down what you should do instead. You instinctually know where they went wrong, and you know where the gap is between what they did and what you know to be right.

This is extremely valuable. It is like learning to walk by falling down or learning to ride a bike by crashing. Watching an anti-mentor at work is like watching game film of your poor performances to see your mistakes from an external perspective. Once you have witnessed the failure you better understand the right things to do.

Pro Tip: If you have had nothing but great bosses, binge-watch The Office and let Michael Scott be your anti-guide.

Key Takeaway

Don’t overlook the power of those who show you what not to do. Anti-mentors can help you grow and learn as quickly as positive mentors, because we are wired to learn from pain and discomfort. Anti-mentors are easy to find. They are everywhere. Now, it’s time to put them to good use for you.

*If you know someone who could benefit from this message, please share it with them.

**If you were one of my great bosses, supervisors or managers and don’t think this is about you, you’re right, it’s the other ones.