How To Make Use of Your Strengths and Talents? Many people nowadays experience difficulties and all sorts of challenges in life, and they keep on struggling to make ends meet. As the challenges escalate or remain present, their mind gets filled with harming thoughts, their frustration gains momentum and turns into hopelessness, and the attraction to give up or give in to despair becomes a welcome sight: a seemingly easier way out.
A relative of mine woke up to the reality that he was not moving ahead in life – he was stuck and so had no way out. When he had that wake-up moment, he decided to start a project from his garage. He had one intention in mind, that of making enough money to leave the job he hated. He delved into the project, yet a few weeks later he gave up. And the sad thing is he did that about six or seven times.
Whilst on Skype one day, something inside of me urged me to rekindle his wake-up moment. I asked him to spend as much time as necessary so he may find a project that he thoroughly enjoyed doing: one that matched his talents, skills, strengths, deep interest or passion. And then I asked him to think deep, spend a day or two brainstorming to come up with two lists, one to identify what he enjoys about the project and the second to list what he doesn’t enjoy.
A few days later he emailed me the results. The list of what he enjoyed about the project, I am happy to say, was much longer. He finally identified a project that he might continue with in the long term, where the potential of quitting was highly reduced. To my pleasant surprise, he followed up this action by pre-empting what would have been my next suggestion. He scoured the Internet, went to book stores and his local library, and read about a few people who have achieved success doing what he had in mind.
Here’s a snippet from his email to me: “Thanks for your rekindling my wake-up moment. An even bigger wake-up moment for me was when I realised that it’s better for me to go ‘back to school’, learn all that I can from others who achieved the success I am after. What a better and quicker way to achieve success. From them I learned how they challenged obstacles and setbacks and what they did to overcome them.” He finished off with this amazing sentence: “If they managed to be a success, so can I.”
Now that’s what I call a successful wake-up moment. It took a while, but in the end it flourished. The big lesson here is to learn from other people: to follow the strategies that they did to achieve success. Whilst you can learn from your mistakes along the way, you can dramatically reduce your margin of mistakes by learning from the mistakes of others.
Remember: if they managed to be a success, so can you.
