Success is not something you pursue but rather attract. And to attract success you must become a seductive target for attraction. This journey of becoming can best be demonstrated through developing leverage. It is simply doing more of what you are good at in order to get what you want. What you are good at is your strengths that, when used properly, can attract success into your life. The creator of Virgin megastores, Richard Branson, leverages his strength of inter-personal skills and made a huge network that grows his businesses over time. Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook, leverages his strength of technical skills and coupled it with well-trained staff to launch the greatest social media empire. Apple’s unmatched innovations in the world of computing can be traced back to its founder, Steve Jobs. His breakthroughs are attributed to leveraging what he is really good at: improvising new designs – a skill he developed when he was a student attending calligraphy classes.
Failure to identify and improve your strengths results in mediocre results. We often get confused of what we are passionate about and what we are good at. Your strengths are not things you desire to be or have. They stare you in the face as an evidence of making the thing happen in real life. This evidence entails a great deal of self-discipline on your part. It’s not one-sided but combination of soft skills and hard skills. The soft skills are your Emotional Intelligence that can’t be quantified. The hard skills are your teachable abilities – your IQ.
To leverage your strength, you must work simultaneously on three levels. The deeper level is your beliefs. To insert new and empowering beliefs, let go of the old limiting ones. Replace the disempowering beliefs with daily affirmations of positive ones. The next layer is developing your skills. They are learnable through demonstration and education. The third level is behavior. You get here deep dive into daily improving your skill. You get great at this skill through daily behavior traits such as daily consistent practice of this skill, being determined and patient.
Related: How Being The Best Takes Time And Practice
Realizing and unleashing your potential needs a shake-up from the roots. That was the centerpiece concept in Haruki Murakami’s 2017 novel, Killing Commendatore. It’s a mesmerizing story of a painter who finds himself, through no choice of his own, in the middle of nowhere in life. He led a boringly married life that draws him complacent and uncreative. But his real transformation comes when his bored wife asks for divorce. He was forced to confront a new and uncharted world of his own.
His journey of transformation starts when he left his house. He drove around northern Japan where he finds a place to stay in the mountains. When his neighbor saw his paintings, he asks him to leverage this skill. The neighbor requests the protagonist to paint his portrait. Through painting, our hero begins to learn how to leverage not only his skill in painting but also the change he is going through into a useful transformation. He eventually had breakthrough paintings he never experienced before.
Success can finally be attained through leveraging your strengths. You first identify the things you are good at. Next, you get better through daily improvements of self-disciplined and consistent practices. Enthused by your deep beliefs, these practices turn into habits that lead eventually to success.
