Key to Success

Keys to Success:

1. Commitment
2. Focus
3. Communication
4. Luck

Identifying Your Strengths:

Much of Buckingham’s book is devoted to helping readers identify their strengths and figure out how to bring them into play in their workplaces. He defines a strength as something that has the following four characteristics:

1. Success. A strength is something you’re good at. I love playing Scrabble, but it’s not a strength of mine. I can tell because even though I enjoy it, I lose most of the games I play. If I wanted to become a professional Scrabble player, I’d have a long, uphill battle ahead of me. Being successful isn’t enough, though. People are often very good at things they don’t enjoy. That doesn’t mean they should pursue those things.Play to your strength not weakness. On the flip side he talks about how if you are passionate about something, but don’t have a natural talent it is something that should probably be a hobby.
2. Instinct. “Your strengths have an I-can’t-help-but quality to them,” writes Buckingham. They’re the things you’ll do for love. Writing is like this for me: I write for a living, but I also do it to relax, to play and to make sense of my life. If I don’t have any work-in-progress on my desk, I’ll make something up. I don’t write because it’s my job; rather it’s my job because I kept doing it for a long time when it was simply a passion.
3. Growth. Strengths allow you to grow. Buckingham provides a roadmap to knowing when you’re experiencing that growth: Pay attention to when you feel happy and when you feel focused. Look for the things that feel easy, he says. The activities in which you’re most likely to experience flow, losing track of time as you’re completely and happily absorbed in your work. Those are your strengths. The things that energize you as you work at them.
4. Needs. Your strengths fill a need. When you’ve done something you’re strong at, you feel a kind of deep satisfaction. A sense, as Buckingham puts it, that all is right with the world. That feeling of rightness is a pointer that you’re doing something right, something you should keep on doing. No matter how tired you are when you’ve finished, you don’t feel mentally or emotionally drained. Your work feeds you rather than taking away from your well-being.

ref: http://www.getrichslowly.org/blog/2011/07/21/playing-to-your-strengths/