Reaching Excellence!

Blog 27Reaching excellence and preventing failure are two different things.

In his work, “Now Discover Your Strengths”, Marcus Buckingham and Donald O. Clifton, discuss the need to release our myopic preoccupation with improving our weaknesses and to instead focus on refining, honing, and perfecting our strengths! They wrote, “To clear our skewed perspective, however, we must remember that casting a critical eye on our weaknesses and working hard to manage them, while sometimes necessary, will only help us prevent failure. It will not help us reach excellence…. you will reach excellence only by understanding and cultivating your strengths” (p. 124).

You want excellence! To achieve this, yes, you must manage your weaknesses enough that they don’t undermine success and cause failure. But don’t focus on your weaknesses. Don’t labor at improving your weaknesses. Excellence is best achieved by the refining, honing, and perfecting your strengths!

Discover your strengths. Work your strengths. Improve your strengths. And don’t let up. Round your strengths. Smooth your strengths. Polish your strengths. Keep going! When you sharpen your strengths, you excel! When you excel, excellence is yours!