Why Ignoring Your Strengths Is Detrimental To Your Achievement

"Know Thyself," Socrates said.

How well do you know yourself right now?

What inspires, motivates and fires you up the most?

What are your strengths, weaknesses, values, purpose, passion, preference, penchant, mission and vision in life?

Cultivating self-awareness is one of the first steps in creating what you want and mastering your life.

If you're not aware of the problems, you won't realize the need for self-improvement and there's no way your life will get better. Strengths & virtues are one of the fields.

Positive Psychologist Martin Seligman and Christopher Peterson found that the happiest people are those who have #1 discovered their unique strengths & virtues and #2 use those strengths & virtues #3 for a purpose greater than their own personal goals.

So if you don't know and use your strengths & virtues, you will likely be unproductive, unfulfilling and unhappy.

A few years ago when I started to fall in love with personal development, I took an assessment called Clifton Strengths Finder by the Gallup research group. According to the results, my top 5 strengths are Learner, Intellection, Connectedness, Responsibility and Input.

While I believe that personality, passions and hobbies may change over time, strengths & weaknesses seem to be more fixated.

Yes most skills are learnable, but there are certain things that just come naturally to you while there are other things that you just can't be the best in the world no matter how hard you try.

So even though I kind of knew what I was good at, taking these strengths tests helped me a ton on clarifying & explaining my reality in an objective manner.

It helped me to realize that I have a great desire to learn and are passionate about continual improvement.

It helped me to recognize that I am the kind of introspective person who appreciates intellectual discussions.

It helped me to explain why I have such faith in seeing the underlying links among all things.

It helped me to comprehend why I have such psychological need to take ownership of what I say I will do.

It helped me to understand my craving to know more, collect more and gather more information.

So what did I do with these accurate results? I strategized how I could utilize these strengths to build my career.

Instead of following the traditional route of getting a regular job that's relevant to my law degree, I decided to research online and create my own job using my strengths, passions and self-responsibility.

That's how I found that coaching is a career that fulfills me a lot.

That's how I found that content creation is something I enjoyed doing daily.

That's how I found that online entrepreneurship is the modern best "Fastlane" to create the kind of massive impact I want while providing the financial support I need.

In short, my strengths have guided me to where I am today.

It's one of the rare cornerstones that can satisfy most of your life areas - productivity, money, happiness, achievements, and fulfillment.

Of course there are many strengths test you can take other than Gallup's one (e.g. VIA Signature Strengths).

I don't know if one is superior to another, but the point is not to get caught up on these minutiae.

Pick one you like, find out your natural strengths, and be more self-aware today!

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