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Traditionally, we’ve been fixated with our weaknesses  

• Unfortunately, most of us have little sense of our talents and strengths, much less the ability to build our lives around them. Instead, guided by our parents, by our teachers, by our managers, and by psychology’s fascination with pathology, we become experts in our weaknesses and spend our lives trying to repair these flaws, while our strengths lie dormant and neglected. Marcus Buckingham
• Most Americans do not know what their strengths are. When you ask them, they look at you with a blank stare, or they respond in terms of subject knowledge, which is the wrong answer. Peter Drucker
• Do you have the opportunity to do what you do best every day? Chances are you don’t. All too often our natural talents go untapped. From the cradle to the cubicle, we devote more time to fixing our shortcomings than to developing our strengths. Tom Rath
• Everyone is a genius. But if you judge a fish on its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.  Albert Einstein
• So much of our lives is given over to the consideration of our imperfections that there is no time to improve our imaginary virtues. The truth is we only perfect our vices, and man is a worse creature when he dies than he was when he was born. Edward Dahlberg
• Growth,  Weakness,  Strength,  Talent

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We need to focus on growing our strengths, not our weaknesses  

• I do not believe that you should devote overly much effort to correcting your weaknesses. Rather, I believe that the highest success in living and the deepest emotional satisfaction comes from building and using your signature strengths. Martin Seligman
• Stop trying to fix your weaknesses. You can’t be perfect. Focus on your strengths and let other people do what you’re bad at. Henri Junttila
• Most people are good at a handful of things and utterly miserable at most. It is far more lucrative and fun to leverage your strengths instead of attempting to fix all the chinks in your armor. Timothy Ferriss
• Persons are judged to be great because of the positive qualities they possess, not because of the absence of faults. John Fitzgerald Kennedy
• Erase self-doubt by working to build your strengths instead of focusing on your weaknesses. Rodolfo Costa
• People are always neglecting something they can do in trying to do something they can’t do. Edgar Watson Howe
• Don’t let what you cannot do interfere with what you can do. John Wooden
• Focus on your potential instead of your limitations. Alan Loy McGinnis
• If you think a weakness can be turned into a strength, I hate to tell you this, but that’s another weakness. Jack Handy
• Focus on your strengths. Brian Tracy
• We need to build the right habits, so that week in, week out, and year upon year, we stay in control, always pushing toward activities that strengthen us, ever watchful for those that drag us down. Marcus Buckingham
• Know your strengths and take advantage of them. Greg Norman
• Masters focus on what they do best. That’s how they become masters. They stay in their zone, and the zone is what feels good. Damn good. Danielle LaPorte
• What you lack in one department, you make up for it in another. Liam Williams
• I think what weakens people most is fear of wasting their strength. Etty Hilsum
• Build upon strengths, and weaknesses will gradually take care of themselves. Joyce C Lock
• Everyone is gifted – but some people never open their package.  Buddha
• Go with the best you’ve got.  Jim Hartness
• Hide not your talents. They for use were made. What’s a sundial in the shade.  Benjamin Franklin
• I believe that every person is born with talent. Maya Angelou
• Just do what you do best.  Red Auerbach
• Live in terms of your strong points. Magnify them. Let your weaknesses shrivel up and die from lack of nourishment.  William Young Elliott
• Too many people overvalue what they are not, and undervalue what they are. – Malcolm Forbes
• Those with a high level of confidence may have as many or more weaknesses than those with low self- esteem. The difference is this; instead of dwelling on their handicaps, they compensate for them by dwelling on their strengths. Alan Loy McGinnis
• One does what one can, not what one cannot. Agatha Christie
• It’s only when we can work with something that brings out our strengths that we’re of any real use. Henning Mankell

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By correcting just our weaknesses, the most we become is mediocre  

• Correcting our weaknesses, the most we become is mediocre. If we hone our few super- strengths, insist on behavior that is authentic and true to our inner selves, and unreasonably demand more with less, the sky is the limit. Richard Koch
• The choice is between multiplication of results using strengths or incremental improvement fixing weaknesses that will, at best, become mediocre. Timothy Ferriss
• Being well-rounded is highly over-rated. Focus on developing your true strengths.  Get better at what you’re already best at – that’s how you enter your mastery zone.  Competency is for suckers.  Danielle LaPorte
• At an early age, you started hearing it: It’s a virtue to be “well-rounded.”… They might as well have said: Become as dull as you possibly can be. Donald O. Clifton
• When we studied them, excellent performers were rarely well rounded. On the contrary, they were sharp. Donald O. Clifton
• The really unhappy person is the one who leaves undone what they can do, and starts doing what they don’t understand.  Goethe
• When we think about our strengths, we are strong. When we think about our weaknesses, we are weak.  Pete Cohen

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We were all born with talents  

• Our talents are the gift that God gives to us… What we make of our talents is our gift back to God.  Leo Buscaglia
• Everyone has talent. What is rare is the courage to follow the talent to the dark place where it leads. Erica Jong
• Everyone has in him something precious that is in no one else.  Martin Buber
• Everyone is gifted – but some people never open their package. Buddha
• I believe that every person is born with talent.  Maya Angelou
• Find your own ‘sweet spot’. Take your talents and enjoy them, share them, expand them.  Kofi Awoonor
• If you have a talent, use it in every which way possible. Don’t hoard it. Don’t dole it out like a miser. Spend it lavishly like a millionaire intent on going broke.  Brendan Francis
• Talent

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Our challenge is to identify what our strengths are and use them to the full  

• The most exciting place to discover talent is in yourself.  Ashleigh Brilliant
• We are each born with a spark of genius. It’s our job to find this spark and give it the fuel it needs to burn brightly. Che Garman
• We are each gifted in a unique and important way. It is our privilege and our adventure to discover our own special light.  Mary Dunbar
• We don’t need more strength or more ability or greater opportunity. What we need is to use what we have.  Basil S Walsh
• Whatever you are by nature, keep to it; never desert your line of talent. Be what nature intended you for and you will succeed.  Sydney Smith
• When I stand before God at the end of my life, I would hope that I would not have a single bit of talent left, and could say, “I used everything you gave me.”  Erma Bombeck
• If you have ability in a certain area, why not capitalize on it and improve it and use it? Wilt Chamberlain
• Potential

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Your combination of talents and strengths is as unique as you are  

• Each person’s talents are enduring and unique. Donald O. Clifton
• You have a talent that is unique in its expression, so unique that there’s no one else alive on this planet that has that talent, or that expression of that talent. This means that there’s one thing you can do, and one way of doing it, that is better than anyone else on this entire planet. Deepak Chopra
• We all have special gifts, unique imaginations, our little bit of genius: the spark of life that’s wholly ours. Richard Koch
• Everyone has in him something precious that is in no one else.  Martin Buber
• Leverage your uniqueness.  Bruce Tulgan
• Uniqueness

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The synergy of your strengths can create something unique and compelling  

• Each of your top strengths is so interwoven with the others that it is modified by association. Try not to examine your strengths in isolation but examine how each one modifies the others and what the combination effect is. Marcus Buckingham
• It’s not about having a single strength, it’s about using the synergy of your strengths. Marcus Buckingham
• Synergy

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Turn your talents into strengths through adding knowledge and skill  

• Talent is any recurring pattern of thought, feeling, or behavior that can be productively applied. Donald O. Clifton  
• The key to building a strength is to first identify your dominant talents, then refine them with knowledge and skills. Marcus Buckingham
• Talent is a multiplier. The more attention and energy you invest in it, the greater the yield. Marcus Buckingham
• Identify their talents, build them into strengths, and enjoy consistent, near perfect performance. Marcus Buckingham
• If you learn a skill, it will help you get a little better, but it will not cover for a lack of talent. Instead, as you build your strengths, skills will actually prove most valuable when they are combined with genuine talent. Donald O. Clifton
• Life is not about discovering our talents; it is about pushing our talents to the limit and discovering our genius. Robert Brault
• A winner is someone who recognizes his God-given talents, works his tail off to develop them into skills and uses these skills to accomplish his goals. Larry Bird
• Achievement is talent plus preparation. Malcolm Gladwell
• Natural abilities are like natural plants, that need pruning by study; and studies themselves do give forth directions too much at large, except they be bounded in by experience. Francis Bacon
• Knowledge,  Skill

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Our greatest room for growth lies in the area of our strengths  

• When we’re able to put most of our energy into developing our natural talents, extraordinary room for growth exists. So, a revision to the “You-can- be-anything-you-want-to-be” maxim might be more accurate: You cannot be anything you want to be—but you can be a lot more of who you already are. Tom Rath
• You grow most in your areas of greatest strength. You will improve the most, be the most creative, be the most inquisitive, and bounce back the fastest in those areas where you have already shown some natural advantage over everyone else—your strengths. This doesn’t mean you should ignore your weaknesses. It just means you’ll grow most where you’re already strong. Marcus Buckingham
• You grow the most, learn the most, develop the most in the areas where you already have some natural advantage. Marcus Buckingham
• Each person’s greatest room for growth is in the areas of his or her greatest strength. Donald O. Clifton
• By now you know that the biological underpinnings of your strengths are the presence of thick branches of synaptic connections. You also know that because of natures habit of piggy- backing on existing infrastructure, you will grow the most new synaptic connections in those areas where you already have the most existing ones.  Here you will learn the most, come up with the most new ideas, and have the best insights.  Marcus Buckingham
• We will never be great at the things we have to try to be good at. But we can be amazing at the things we’re easily great at. Danielle LaPorte
• Growth

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Leveraging our strengths leads to excellence and success  

• Success is achieved by developing our strengths, not by eliminating our weaknesses. Marilyn vos Savant
• You will excel only by maximizing your strengths, never by fixing your weaknesses. This is not the same as saying ‘ignore your weaknesses.’ Donald O. Clifton
• Across the board, having the opportunity to develop our strengths is more important to our success than our role, our title, or even our pay. Tom Rath
• The greatest thing a man can do in this world is to make the most possible out of the stuff that has been given him. This is success, and there is no other. Orison Swett Marden
• Success is the maximum utilization of the ability that you have. Zig Ziglar
• Whatever you are by nature, keep to it; never desert your line of talent. Be what nature intended you for and you will succeed. Sydney Smith
• I often get tempted to work on my weaknesses. What happens when I do is drain my energy.  At best, I get mediocre results. When I play to my strengths, I keep a high level of energy. This energy builds momentum and it’s the key to how I get results.  D. Meier
• Your most valuable currency is what comes most naturally to you. Cash in. Danielle LaPorta
• One that desires to excel should endeavor in those things that are in themselves most excellent. Epictetus
• You have many abilities that make you uniquely you. Develop and share these talents with the world and you will be successful.  Che Garman
• It is what we do easily and what we like to do that we do well.  Orison Swett Marden
• Excellence,  Success

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Using our strengths consistently leads to happiness  

• The truth is that all of us attain the greatest success and happiness possible in this life whenever we use our native capacities to their greatest extent. Smiley Blanton
• What is the good life? In my view, you can find it by following a startlingly simple path. The ‘pleasant life’ might be had by drinking champagne and driving a Porsche, but not the good life. Rather, the good life is using your signature strengths every day to produce authentic happiness and abundant gratification. Martin Seligman
• The person born with a talent they are meant to use will find their greatest happiness in using it. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
• You’ll be happiest working in a career that allows you to take advantage of your strengths on a daily basis. Steve Pavlina
• People simply feel better about themselves when they’re good at something. Stephen Covey
• Happiness

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Using our strengths consistently is a key to authentic living  

• The well-being that using your signature strengths engenders is anchored in authenticity. Martin Seligman
• The most responsible, the most challenging, and, in the sense of being true to yourself, the most honorable thing to do is face up to the strength potential inherent in your talents and then find ways to realize it. Donald O. Clifton

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Use your strengths to add meaning and purpose to your life  

• The good life consists in deriving happiness by using your signature strengths every day in the main realms of living. The meaningful life adds one more component: using these same strengths to forward knowledge, power, or goodness. Martin Seligman
• If you can find a way to use your signature strengths at work often, and also see your work as contributing to the greater good, you have a calling. A calling is a passionate commitment to work for its own sake. Martin Seligman
• Every person was born with a purpose and a plan and its through our individual strengths where we can find that purpose and live our life to its fullest. J. Charest
• Master Your Craft. Be the best at the God-given skills and talents that allow you to fully express your life purpose. Brad Swift
• Nature arms each man with some faculty which enables him to do easily some feat impossible to any other, and thus makes him necessary to society. Ralph Waldo Emerson
• When nature has work to be done, she creates a genius to do it. Ralph Waldo Emerson
• Each human being was given two qualities: power and the gift. Power directs us towards our destiny; the gift obliges us to share with others what is best in us. Paulo Coelho
• When I dare to be powerful — to use my strength in the service of my vision, then it becomes less and less important whether I am afraid. Audre Lorde
• Meaning,  Purpose

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Applying and practicing your strengths helps you become a master  

• Commit today to becoming a master. Ask yourself what are you best at? What things do you do that when you do them you feel happy and at peace–and sense your creativity and gifts pouring out of you. We get the life we’ve settled for. We get the brains we’ve earned. Start looking for those things in your work (and life) that you can become a Picasso at. Life shifts once you do. Robin Sharma
• Mastery

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How do you identify your strengths?  

• The acid test of a strength? The ability is a strength only if you can fathom yourself doing it repeatedly, happily, and successfully. Donald O. Clifton
• It’s not necessarily what you’re good at or what you’re capable of—it’s what feels amazing when you do it. Ergo, a weakness is the stuff you do that makes you feel weakened. Deceptively simple. Revolutionary. Danielle LaPorte
• A strength is “an activity that makes you feel strong.” It is an activity where the doing of it invigorates you. Before you do it, you find yourself instinctively looking forward to it. While you are doing it you don’t struggle to concentrate, but instead you become so immersed that time speeds up and you lose yourself in the present moment. And after you are finished doing it, you feel authentic, connected to the best parts of who you really are. Marcus Buckingham
• Talents not only come naturally to us, but are also accompanied by an “it feels good” quality. So it not only feels natural to use them, it also feels good to use them, thus constantly pushing us towards using our talents again and again. Marcus Buckingham
• Try an activity and see how quickly you pick it up, how quickly you skip steps in the learning and add twists and kinks you haven’t been taught yet. See whether you become absorbed in the activity to such an extent that you lose track of time. Donald O. Clifton
• Watch for signs of excitement. When you engage in an activity you are truly good at, your excitement is visible. When do you feel most engaged? Most energized? Todd Kashdan
• Think back over times you’ve picked something up quickly, or found you were a ‘natural’ at something. Warren Davies
• An ability to rapidly learn a new skill will give us clues to a talent’s presence. Marcus Buckingham
• Ask yourself where you get your energy from. What activities give you a buzz when you’re doing them?  If you can think of some, they probably involve your strengths.  Warren Davies
• While your spontaneous reactions provide the clearest trace of your talents, here are three more clues to keep in mind: yearnings, rapid learning, and satisfactions. Yearnings reveal the presence of a talent, particularly when they are felt early in life. Donald O. Clifton
• If you find yourself actually anticipating the activity-‘When can I do this again?’-it is a pretty good sign that you are enjoying it and that one of your talents is in play. Donald O. Clifton
• Some activities just seem to fill an innate need of yours. When you’re done with them, you may feel physically tired, to the point where you are not yet ready to saddle up and tackle them all over again.  But you don’t feel psychologically drained.  Instead you feel fulfilled, powerful, restored, the exact opposite of drained.  It’s a satisfying feeling, sure but it’s also much more than mere satisfaction.  It feels authentic, correct.  Marcus Buckingham
• True strength is not necessarily about skill or adeptness. It’s about vitality. Danielle LaPorte
• Enthusiasm is a fantastic indicator of where your true strength lives. It’s the immediate “I love it!” response. Danielle LaPorte
• Above all, challenge yourself. You may well surprise yourself at what strengths you have, what you can accomplish. Cecile Springer
• Adversity has the effect of eliciting talents, which in prosperous circumstances would have lain dormant.  Horace  
• When you’re good at something, you’ll tell everyone. When you’re great at something, they’ll tell you. Walter Payton

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Questions to identify your strengths

• What are you naturally good at?
• What activities give you strength?
• What activities invigorate you and fill you with energy?
• What activities make you lose track of time?
• What in the past did you find you learned quickly?
• What activities do you anticipate and enjoy?
• What activities could you imagine doing all day?
• What activities or skills do you learn quickly and add twists and kinks you haven’t been taught yet?
• What activities do you excel at?
• What’s something you know you do differently than most people?
• What is something that is easier for you than most people?
• What do people thank you for most often? What do they come to you for?
• When do you feel powerful, passionate, free, incredibly useful, excited, inspired?
• What do you think your form of genius is? What are you amazing at?

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Identify your strengths by taking the VIA survey of character strengths

• This focuses on 24 character or virtue strengths
• Register at http://www.authentichappiness.sas.upenn.edu
• Then take the test.
• See a list of the 24 character strengths

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Identify your strengths by taking the Clifton StrengthsFinder 2.0 questionnaire

• This test lets you identify your top 5 strengths amongst 34 different thirty-four different strength themes. It is based on Gallup survey of 2 million people.
• To do the online test, you need to buy the book and get a unique access code.
• Get the book 
• See a list of the 34 strengths: 
• Also here.

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Manage your weaknesses without fixating on them  

• Our definition of a weakness is anything that gets in the way of excellent performance. Donald O. Clifton
• A weakness is an activity that makes you feel weak. Even if you’re good at it, if it drains you, that’s a weakness. Marcus Buckingham
• Each of these strategies-get a little better at it, design a support system, use one of your strongest themes to overwhelm your weakness, find a partner, and just stop doing it-can help you as you strive to build your life around your strengths. Donald O. Clifton
• The point here is not that you should always forgo this kind of weakness fixing. The point is that you should see it for what it is: damage control, not development. And as we mentioned earlier, damage control can prevent failure, but it will never elevate you to excellence. Donald O. Clifton

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Find others who fill your gaps  

• Surround yourself with people who fill your gaps. Let them do the stuff they’re better at so you can do the stuff you’re better at.  Marc Chernoff  
• As soon as you can, find partners who are energized by the tasks that exhaust and deplete you. If you can’t find the right partner, outsource the aspects of your business that make you want to crawl back into bed. Sonia Simone
• Choose a business partner the way you choose a tennis partner. Select someone who’s strong where you are weak.   Jackson Brown, Jr
• I can do things you cannot, you can do things I cannot; together we can do great things.  Mother Teresa

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Don’t be afraid to admit your weaknesses  

• The man with insight enough to admit his limitations comes nearest to perfection. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

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• We are like tea bags – we don’t know our own strength until we’re in hot water. Jutta Baum Busche
• Strength is the capacity to break a chocolate bar into four pieces with your bare hands-and then just eat one of the pieces. Judith Viorst
• Our strength is that we don’t have any weaknesses; our weakness is that we don’t have any real strengths.  Frank Broyles
• Our strength is often composed of the weakness that we’re damned if we are going to show. Mignon McLaughlin
• My sport is about 90 per cent strength and 40 per cent technique.  Johnny Walker
• If youth but had the knowledge and old age the strength.  French proverb
• I feel very humble; but I think I have the strength of character to fight it.  Bob Hope
• People who have no weaknesses are terrible; there is no way of taking advantage of them.  Anatole France
• If you think a weakness can be turned into a strength I hate to tell you this but that’s another weakness.  Jack Handey

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