How Your Strengths Can Lead You to Success

Imagine this scenario:

A baker needs to give his wife the perfect gift. So, he goes out shopping for something to give her.

He browses through jewelry at the jewelry store but doesn’t know how to tell what she would like.

He looks at some lingerie but doesn’t know anything about it. Ultimately, he buys her a book, even though he isn’t sure what she likes to read.

All of this time, instead of trying to buy her gifts that he knows nothing about, he could have baked the perfect cake or other pastry.

Now, this isn’t a perfect analogy.

Most bakers’ wives probably eat so much cake that they would hate it as a gift.

But the point is that many people try to be successful without using a single one of their strengths.

Writers try to make a fortune by building websites. Website designers try to make a fortune by writing novels.

People don’t use their strengths nearly as often as they should to achieve success.

Here are some things that you can do to make sure that you are using your strengths to help you achieve your goals and become successful.

1. Know what your strengths are. Sit down and make a list of things that you are good at. Identify the ones that you are best at and put them at the top of the list.
2. Determine how you can apply each strength to being successful. If you are looking for some way to become financially independent, then evaluate your strengths with that. If you have already chosen a route to success, then determine how your strengths might be able to help you go further.
3. Write down your goals if you haven’t already. Then look at each goal and adjust it so that you are using your strengths to their full potential to help you achieve those goals.
4. Break your goals down further into short-term goals like monthly or weekly ones and do the same thing with your strengths.
5. Finally, break your goals down into daily habits and decide how those same strengths can help you stick by your habits, replacing the bad ones with good ones.
6. Continue these self-evaluations regularly and make sure that you are using your strengths instead of things that you aren’t good at to achieve success.

Prioritize More if You Want to be Successful

When you want to be successful, you have to prioritize. This often means that some things get overlooked and unfortunately, sometimes they are things that you don’t want to overlook.

But you have to make sacrifices if you want to achieve your goals and that means deciding what is most important and working on it first and foremost.

The reason for this is simple: we want too many things. Human beings are famous for wanting too much.

It’s like our motto, especially here in America.

More, more, more.

This is true in the food that we eat, it is true of the things that we buy and it is true of the money that we make.

Of course, it is also true of the things that drive us and the goals that we have, and that’s not a bad thing.

The problem is, when you have too many things that you want to accomplish, you aren’t going to have time for them all, and unless you prioritize, you are probably going to end up doing the things that are the most fun rather than the things that are the most important.

Let’s look at an example of this.

Meet Richard.

Richard is trying to make a list of the things that he wants to accomplish over the next five years. Here is what he has written down.

• Learn 5 new languages (1 per year) – Spanish, German, American Sign Language, French and Italian
• Learn how to play musical instruments like a pro – first guitar and then piano
• Learn how to do my taxes and keep track of business taxes
• Start my own business – some kind of retail store that is unique and fills a need
• Volunteer more – do some church work, homeless shelters, give to charity
• Become more organized so that I never miss appointments and always know where stuff is
• Lose 50 pounds and get in shape like I was when I was in my 30’s

We’ll stop here because you probably get the idea.

Richard wants to do so many things, but accomplishing them will take up far too much time.

For example, learning a new language in a year will take about 30-45 minutes every day.

If you added up all of his stuff just from this partial list, half the day would be gone.

That’s why prioritizing is vital. If you cannot choose what is most important and work on it first and most

The Life Cycle of a Major Achievement

One of the common problems that people have when they are first starting on the road to success is seeing how a major achievement will work.

It is difficult to see more than the very beginning and the result – the success. We are going to take an example here and go through the entire life cycle of an achievement so that you can see how it is done and it should motivate you by making the result much more realistic.

EXAMPLE: Increase annual income by $12,000

So,

your goal is to increase your income by $12,000 a year. Let’s suppose that you give yourself three years to do it. So, here’s what the timeline might look like if you start from scratch.

January, Year 1: You spend the month researching ways that you can make money online. You check out each lead carefully until you find one that you have the time, money, and skills for.

By the end of the month you have chosen one – in this example case, you have chosen to start a niche review site online about the latest electronics and use Amazon’s affiliate program to make money.

March, Year 1: You have developed a website and added all kinds of Amazon products to it, and you have outsourced a couple of hundred reviews.

Your traffic is starting to trickle in.

December, Year 1: You have spent the past few months creating backlinks and going after non-competitive keywords and have come up with a pretty steady stream of traffic.

You are making around $1000 a year so far, which comes to about $85 a month.

May, Year 2: Your income is going up.

All of the content you have ordered has started bringing in huge traffic for long-tail keywords.

But your income has only increased to $150 a month. You aren’t sure why.

November, Year 2: After several weeks of research, you realize that your site’s buying links were difficult to find. You changed them and increased your conversion rate by 500%. You’re now making a little over $4000 a year.

December, Year 3: You have been continually adding content and getting backlinks to your site.

Now, you have grown to be one of the most well-respected TV review sites on the web. You have been able to make almost $14,000 this year.

Why Motivation Doesn’t Matter

You may think that motivation is the key to success.

Many people do, and that’s why so many people fail at their goals. Motivation is a fickle friend.

It’s sort of like the classic literary muse. Sometimes it is there, guiding you along, and sometimes it is as elusive as a breath of fresh air in a fire.

If you wait until you are motivated, you are never going to achieve your goals.

So, what is a person to do then?

How do you reach your goals if you aren’t motivated to do so?

There is only one way that you can make it through the times when you don’t feel motivated and that is by committing to something and sticking to it.

It is very easy to complete tasks and work on your success when you feel motivated.

When you are motivated, every task seems easy and every goal seems achievable.

But when you are not motivated, every task seems like total drudgery and your goals seem like they will never be realized.

When those times come – when you cannot conjure up enough motivation to get you through the tasks that you have set for yourself, that’s when you need to sit down and remember the commitments that you have made to yourself.

There are a couple of steps before that which will help you when the time comes to use commitment to proceed.

First, you have to teach yourself that commitment is important, even if it is to yourself.

Most people have a habit of breaking commitments to themselves and so it is not a big deal when they do it again.

You need to convince yourself that making a promise to yourself is just as important as a promise you make to someone else.

You also need to have the commitments laid out and on paper in advance.

You aren’t going to be able to use the commitment to force yourself to complete your tasks if you don’t know what they are.

Make sure that your commitments are written down somewhere.

The bottom line is that you recognize that you are going to have times when motivation isn’t enough, and when that happens, you are going to want to have a plan of action and pre-recorded commitments so that you can push through when you don’t feel like working and get the things that you need to be done accomplished.