You hear a lot of trite bullshit on success these days. One of the usual suspects I always hated was, “Lean into your strengths.”
I never really gave this too much credence because of two reasons:
1. It seemed perfectly fucking obvious
2. I didn’t perceive that my strengths were different and unique from others
Maybe I was just bitter about the whole thing? Until last May that is when I finally did lean into one of my perceived strengths.
Writing. But not just writing. It was writing every damn day that did it.
By no means will my work ever win awards and accolades, but writing each day helped me improve enormously. Failure with demonstrable improvement doesn’t really feel like failing sometimes. It’s just another iteration. Another rep. Another day.
But along the way something crazy happened.
The clarity I gained from daily writing started bleeding over into other areas of my life, like work, after years of struggling to get out of the pile.
Improving my writing astonishingly led to improved sales numbers.
But it wasn’t just the raw sales numbers. I put myself out there in other ways that leveraged what I was good at. I came up with strategic plans and shared them with leadership.
About how to regroup our sales team under difficult conditions, about how to attract, hire, train and retain good talent, and about the future of our business as our “cheese” is constantly on the move.
And perhaps most timely of all I leaned into a love of teaching. My team hired 7 new people in the last few months, and I’ve had a constant hand in training all of them. I share in their successes and setbacks and it’s one of the most rewarding times of my career because of it.
Put yourself out there with the best you have.
You never know what could happen if you do.
So dare for mighty things.
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