How to Discover Your Unique Ability - and Bring It Out in Others

Think about the one thing you love to do. It could be a task you perform in your job, in school, or in your everyday life. This is the thing that energizes you when you think about it, and motivates you to get up every day. When you're doing it, time seems to fly by, and you walk away with more energy than when you started. Now imagine doing that thing every day.  This is your unique ability, and designing your life (and work) to spend more time doing it is the secret to greater happiness and productivity. In this episode, we break down the concept of unique ability in the context of our working lives. You will learn: What we mean by unique ability. How to discover your own unique ability. How to align our work with our unique ability. How to bring out unique ability in the people you work with. BONUS EXERCISE: Love It / Loathe It Here's Marcus Buckingham's quick and easy strategy for discovering your unique ability: Take a piece of paper and draw a line down the middle. On one side write “Loved It,” and the other write “Loathed It.” As you go through your week, reflect daily on the things that you looked forward to, that made time speed up, that energize, or that may have made you a little tired, but that you want to do again. Those all go in the “Loved It” category. Now think about everything you do that you put off, that makes time drag on, or that leave you completely drained and exhausted. Those go in the “Loathed It” category. Before long, you’ll have a clear picture of your strengths. The beauty of this method is that it’s not abstract – these are actual tasks, functions, or activities that you actually perform during your week. Now summarize your findings using specific action verbs (again, nothing abstract). For Marcus, these words were “interview” and “mingle” – he found that he loved interviewing people, but absolutely loathed mingling.   Links Dan Sullivan, Strategic Coach Marcus Buckingham on the Awesome Office show