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Don’t worry about improving on your weaknesses, and instead focus on your strengths.

The following quote is pretty enlightening in it’s decoration. Not only will working on our strengths in the end give us a higher level of expertise than we would achieve by working on a weakness, but the belief is that since you probably love to do what you are already great at, you’ll enjoy working on your strengths much more than you would your weaknesses.

That being said, I’m a pretty firm believer that you do what makes you happy. So if you enjoy what is comparatively a weakness, you go and work on that. Explore that part of your life and don’t trust anything for what it is. In reality your strength isn’t necessarily a predictor of long-term happiness.

But my strengths – ah, I love my strengths. I’ll work on them till the purple cows come home. When we love what we do, we do more and more, and pretty soon we’re pretty good at it. – Marti Barletta

The Year That Matters is a series by Malcolm Bastien that goes through the ideas and concepts presented in Seth Godin and Friends’ ebook, What Matters Now. Each day a new  idea from the ebook will be reviewed and discussed. Subscribe to Open Mode to get the entire series.

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Set your goals high. Being good enough isn’t good enough. Be the most of something (e.g. The most colourful, the most responsive).

Gary Vaynerchuk would say that the key to winning is being the “most caring”. In most if not all cases that probably is true because no matter who you are, unless you consciously want to be treated badly in order so save a few bucks, everybody live to feel appreciated. Since all businesses in some sense or form has customers, then they all have an audience that they can care about. In that sort of environment it’s about out-caring the other guys.

At the same time Gary would probably say why stop there? Best care, best price, best product. (Now like Gary or not, I think no matter what anyone says he does a good job of representing himself not only as loud, and obnoxious, but as the most caring. Hence why I bring him up so much in this post).

Today, with so much change and uncertainty, so much pressure and new ways to do things, the middle of the road is the road to nowhere. – William C. Taylor

The Year That Matters is a series by Malcolm Bastien that goes through the ideas and concepts presented in Seth Godin and Friends’ ebook, What Matters Now. Each day a new  idea from the ebook will be reviewed and discussed. Subscribe to Open Mode to get the entire series.

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Set standards for yourself, and make them as Steve Jobs said, “Insanely great”.

Effective listening: Strategic advantage number 1! – Tom Peters

A beautiful time to reemphasize the point, that all the internal lessons of What Matters Now are deeply personal, but drive the greatest change when they impact the world around us.

If not excellence, what? – Tom Peters

What happens when you face yourself with the question of: “Why haven’t I expected the best out of myself?” Whatever emotions that come up or doubts that arise as a result you need to get rid of. The only thing to do now is to make a choice going forward.

You don’t need to make false “commitments” to yourself or “try harder”. This is not a action and reaction problem. It’s a daily challenge. Every moment where you suddenly become conscious of your level of commitment and effort, you need to make the decision again and again to being insanely great.

The Year That Matters is a series by Malcolm Bastien that goes through the ideas and concepts presented in Seth Godin and Friends’ ebook, What Matters Now. Each day a new  idea from the ebook will be reviewed and discussed. Subscribe to Open Mode to get the entire series.