Excelling at critical tasks

Try to see your strengths in relation to what energizes you. Something is a strength if: 

• it makes you feel successful
• you're drawn to it
• it fully engages you
• after doing that activity, you feel energized and fulfilled.

It's difficult for us to see our own strengths, but people around us (friends, coworkers, family members, mentors) will most likely see them clearly.

The goal is to identify things that you wouldn't have thought of on your own—or to find patterns.

Ask for feedback, learn from it and adjust your performance (or behavior) according to the areas of improvement that you get to know from others.

Example: After giving a presentation, talk about what went well and ask if there is something that you could have done better.

Keeping a journal with a record of your learnings and feedback (areas of improvement) can keep us on the right path, and speed up our progress, and learning too.

Listing out 5 or 10 areas of improvement and tracking the progress in weekly or monthly reviews is a great way to develop your career.

• The 80/20 method: You can get 80 % proficiency in a subject in about 6 - 12 months.
• The 10,000-hour rule: You can become an expert at something if you spend 10,000 hours of deliberate practice on it. 

To go from zero to 80% (good enough) requires a different approach than that needed to get from 80% - 99% (world-class). The last 20% also requires a different level of commitment. For instance, Stephen King spent 6 - 8 hours daily for ten years before he succeeded as a commercial writer.

The gains disproportionately accrue to people at the top. Stephen King probably sells more books than the rest of his category combined.

Being good at many things probably means that you are at 80% of your potential in all of them. It is not enough to stand out. 

Pick a very few things to tackle through the 10,000-hour rule and try and reach 99% of your potential in them.

Don’t create unnecessary conflict with your co-workers, but don’t run from it, either. See it as an opportunity to better understand someone you’ll be spending 40 hours a week around. 

Chances are, the other person will respond the same way. Goodwill is taken for granted less often than you might think.

At first, asking for help might sound like the opposite of creating your own opportunities. 

Opportunities are tied to personal relationships. Consider the Ben Franklin effect: By asking someone for a small favor, you endear them to yourself. The reason is that, when you help someone, your brain rationalizes your actions by assuming that you must like that person.

Most managers address the bad boss problem by getting out of the subordinate role as quickly as possible and, by improving their own leadership skills, becoming a good boss.

Incompetence can also be seen on how subordinates deal with their bosses.

Workers feel anxious on how their bosses think about them. Should I correct my boss? Does he think of me as a competitor? Am I capable enough? Should I take an action?

Of course, everyone would think of those question before making a move. But a wise subordinate know can recognize that a boss does not know what he needs and the best thing to do is address their suggestions to the boss. Why? Because the boss is the one with the greater power to act.

Current achievements provide happiness, but the memory of past accomplishments do not appear to produce long-lasting happiness.

The waning of ability in people of high accomplishment is particularly difficult psychologically. Retired athletes struggle profoundly after their sports career ends. They are prone to depression, addiction, or suicide.

"Unhappy is he who depends on success to be happy. For such a person, the end of a successful career is the end of the line. His destiny is to die of bitterness or to search for more success in other careers and to go on living from success to success until he falls dead. In this case, there will not be life after success."

Many training initiatives assume that the same group of skills or leadership styles are suitable without considering the strategy or organizational culture of a company.

An excellent leader in one situation does not necessarily perform well in another. Focusing on context means equipping leaders with two or three competencies that will make a distinction to performance, rather than a list of leadership standards that is of no specific benefit.

Companies face a challenge when it comes to planning the program's curriculum.  Adults typically retain only 10 percent of what they hear in classroom lectures, but nearly two-thirds when they learn by doing. 

The answer seems straightforward: tie leadership development to real on-the-job projects. While it is not easy to create opportunities that simultaneously address high-priority needs, companies should strive to make every major business project a leadership-development opportunity as well.

Identify 10-20 people who know you well from a mix of personal and professional contacts, and ask them to write a story about a time when you were at your best. It is best if the sources are specific with concrete examples.

Once the feedback arrives, look for the common themes that appear in multiple stories. Make a list of the themes, the key examples that support each theme, and what they suggest about your strengths.

The relationship protector is often family-oriented. If they can support them emotionally and financially, it gives them their sense of achievement at having helped. 

A relationship protector is far less likely to make spontaneous investments when others depend on them, and their conservative approach to saving prepares them for retirement. 

They’re always looking to expand their options, and every financial decision is carefully calculated to maximize growth. 

The opportunity seeker has to watch out for taking on more risk with business initiatives or investment opportunities. Spending time with a professional to seek a second opinion can help you assess whether the newest opportunity is the best one for you. 

People who want to hire us, invest in our companies or collaborate with us increasingly look at our digital footprints on LinkedIn, Facebook, Google and Twitter to ‘profile’ us.

As we go more and more online, the way we are perceived digitally, in our display pictures, zoom videos, emails and social media provides a mountain of data for humans, and machines to make judgements about our personal and professional attributes.

As companies and individuals access our digital avatars and make their judgements, we have the ability to curate them and tell them a story that we want them to hear.

We need to understand the algorithms that are formulated to identify signals and patterns, and ‘hack’ them to our advantage.