Increasing Your Chance of Excelling

I believe the idea that to excel in life, you should spend as much time as practical doing the things that you are exceptionally good at.  (I was partially influenced by Marcus Buckingham's books First, Break All The Rules and Now, Discover Your Strengths.)

I’ve noticed in my own life that at the core, my talents don’t change much over time. Finesse in using talents and the applications in which talents are used may both change in time, but the very core of the things at which you excel, the types of activities that you are drawn to, will probably change very little. 

An Exercise to Identify Your Talents

Here’s a useful exercise that I came up with one evening  as I was trying to sort out

Rare traits

In my experience as a recruiter and from talking with friends that hire their own employees, I have learned that there are three traits that are very rare, and thus very valuable.  These traits are, in order of increasing rareness:

1. A personality that can be trusted in front of customers - AKA The Ability To Look Someone In The Eye, The Ability To Not Say Inappropriate Things, or The Ability To Not Ramble In Conversation.
2. A technical mind - Evidenced by the confidence and patience to learn new ideas EVEN if it requires math, programming concepts, circuit design, mechanical knackery or modifying your Windows registry.
3. Ownership of problems -  It's easy to find people that can be cogs in a large corporate machine.  America is full of people that lean on "policies" and hold up a process when they don't know the answer and don't know who to ask. It's really hard to find people that will roll up their sleeves and not back down until the problem is solved.

The first and second traits are relatively common in isolation.  If you have any two of these traits, you are a rare person.  If you have all three, mix in a little initiative and find the people that are looking for you.