Mind your unfair advantage and personal success system
2023-11-18
In striving for success and appreciation by others, we tend to forget two crucial things, two things that can change what you are working for, two things that keep the really successful apart from the vast majority that just tries. I'm talking about your unfair advantage and personal success system. So, let's take a look at them and try to get a grip around their essence...
Many parts of today's world are fundamentally build around the concept of good-at-everything, but not excellent-at-one-thing people . This can be seen in the education system, which requires young individuals here in German to study grammar for their entirely educational life even though they are clearly focussed around math and science, in the requirements of most universities and companies as well as in so many more cases . Heck, I even have to admit that at it's core it is correct - we humans are far more universal than robots and other tools. But we should also acknowledge that not everyone is equally good at something and that every individual has it's own unique strengths, weaknesses and most importantly interests.
And that's what makes the difference. To reach true excellence (or come at least near it), you have to find an area, in which your performance is not only exceptionally good, but you're also heavily interested in. You might have a huge talent for playing the piano, but if you really don't like how it sounds or just aren't into classical music, you will have a really hard time finding the motivation to train and become a true pianist master. No productivity technique ever can change a true lack of interest and you'll either fail or be very unhappy when you still chase such a goal that doesn't suit you. At the other extreme however, you might not know much about programming in the beginning, but if you have a remarkable talent for logical thinking and enjoy forcing stupid silicon to do stuff you want, you'll likely have an amazing time and become a true 10x-developer.
That's what my motto "Life is too short to do things you hate" is about and you should always mind your personal unfair advantage when building a project, brand or business. Find an area in which you excel, think about how you can make money with it, help others or just spend your time doing something useful and start doing the damn thing. You'll find that you don't have to force yourself to work on it, that you have become outstandingly good withing a few months or years and that you don't mind all the struggle as much, since it's something you enjoy and stand behind. As I have mentioned in my second article about work-life balance, you'll have to deal with a limited amount of energy, not time in most cases and working on your passion can really boost the available energy.
Now that you know what to work on and have a project in mind, you might wonder how to become successful at it and this is where your personal success system comes into play. It's bascially just a fancy way of describing a method for achieving success that's worked for YOU in the past and is unique to YOU . To find it, just think back through your life and find a few instances where you've been really proud of something you've accomplished. Once you've got some scenarios in mind, think back to what happened, what you did to achieve that outcome. You'll likely find patterns in this data and are therefore looking at your PERSONAL success system. Some might be more successful when working on something with consistency for a long time but only devoting a few percent of their available energy, while others might perform best with an intensity based approach devoting all their waking effort into something for one or two weeks.
The key point is that everyone is most performant and productive when working differently and that you should really try to follow what works for you. Nowadays, we increasingly try to force static, one-size-fits-all systems onto each other and that's just not going to work. We can see it just as well in large corporations as in governmental agency and schools. So, invest some time into finding your personal strengths and systems and follow them relentlessly, not caring about what others say. If any of this resonates with you, give a try and share your findings in the comments down below...