How To Know What You're Good At

I think most people that don't like their job or aren't sure what job is right for them usually get some advice about how they can first start by figuring out the answer to a simple but tough question what am I good at and the reason it's tough is because what we're really asking ourselves is what am I better than other people at that I can also make money from at the end of the day a huge part of building a career that is right for you is playing to your strengths and choosing the right Arena

where you can Shine the sad part is that there are so many people that end up on a path whether they're pressured by Society misled by others or just caught in bad circumstances where their unique advantages weren't allowed to shine and grow so today I want to talk about some strategies you can use to figure out what you're good at because without knowing this it'd be like playing poker without knowing what cards you have you're basically going to be playing life on hard mode instead of knowing what you have to work with and what you're

super effective at by the way I'm Chris and earlier this year I quit my job as a product manager at Microsoft even though it used to be my dream job I realized I care more about living a life outside the 9 to5 and now I'm trying to share everything I've learned on my life's journey so far to help you build towards becoming the person you want to be sharing things like how I approach figuring out my own strengths and some different ways you can try to figure out yours so before I get some strategies I

Ed in the past here's what I believe I think everyone already has a very unique set of strengths no matter who you are because it's a combination of your personality and your unique life experiences that's made you who you are today so naturally this means you have a unique combination of a bunch of different strengths which is really important to know since this is pretty much the Foundation of your own unique advantage and it kind of makes sense since there's a lot of people that are good at very similar things like being great with people

or being skill with your hands or having crazy math skills but in my opinion it's the combination of all the different strengths that you have in your whole life that really set you apart and I'm not saying you have to decide your job by figuring out how to use every single one of your strengths that you have it'll just be much easier to understand what gives you that edge when you do decide to pick your path and also what parts of yourself you want to focus on building to give you an even better advantage in

your professional life so with that said here's a few questions that you can ask yourself to help figure out what you're good at okay so maybe you want to stay humble and don't like thinking about it too much but something simple you can start with is recognizing the things that people always compliment you on here's the thing most people actually have a pretty biased view of what they're good at and there's a lot of reasons for it but one of the biggest reasons is it's really hard to separate what you want to be good at

versus what you're actually good at especially if you're an ambitious person that cares about growth but when other people compliment you for the most part it's based on actual evidence so whether it's people complimenting you on how well you dress your smile or maybe how comfortable you make them feel take some notes because understanding what other people are complimenting you on and why is a great way to start thinking about some of your real strengths another question I'd ask myself a lot is what gets me into the Zone what am I doing in those moments

when I'm forgetting to eat and sleep your strengths aren't just things you're naturally good at but also the things that your mind obsesses over and naturally likes working on even if you aren't good at something today chances are if you get to that state where you just love working on something so much it'll eventually become comes something you're just really good at so do you have moments in your life like that for me I've always been kind of obsessed with keeping everything really really organized whether it's an urge to always keep my space clean or

always taking time to categorize all the files I have on my laptop from all this over time I got really good at creating structure in my life which also helped me a lot in all the jobs I've had think about what you automatically like spending a lot of time doing just because you feel the need to do it chances are it's different for everyone and part of what makes you unique so this next question might be a bit obvious but it really works what have you learned faster than other people so think about a time

when you were able to pick up something really quickly no matter how small maybe you were better at a subject in school or picked up a sport or video game really quickly there are tons of moments in all of our lives where we just seem to be naturally good at something maybe because of how our brains are wired or that we had some kind of related experience before whatever the reason is write it down and think about why you were able to pick that thing up faster what about it made it easier for you versus

other people chances are it'll lead you to learn more about yourself and your natural talents and the last question you can ask yourself is what are your greatest successes and achievements and I really like this one because you can actually see the evidence for your own strengths so think about something big you've accomplished not big because society says it's big but something really important to you what strengths LED you to reach that goal and what were the reasons you succeeded something that helped me figure this out was back in college when I started a club

with a bunch of friends it wasn't a big success by any means but I was really proud of the fact that I was able to build something that helped other people and even though the club wasn't my idea I ended up having a really great time working on it and I realized from that experience that I had a strength for bringing people together towards a common goal which might be why many years later I realized that this and some of my other strengths would make me a pretty good product manager so think about some tangible

things you had to do in order to achieve that big success and think about why I worked out you might discover something you didn't even know about yourself of course figuring out your unique combination of strengths is just one part of figuring out what career is right for you but it's a really important step something else I also believe is that any average person can learn to be really great at something as long as they have a growth mind set and practice really hard at whatever they do but it's really the ones that recognize their

unique strengths that know how to excel in life by picking the right game to play so thanks for sticking till the end and let me know what you think your unique strengths are I'm really curious thanks yall and see you soon [Music]