Have you ever wondered why some people seem to do far better, and earn far more money, in their chosen fields than others do? You've heard about the 80-20 rule, which says that 80 percent of the sales are made by 20 percent of the salespeople. This means that 20 percent of the salespeople make 80 percent of the commissions as well. In every industry, 20 percent of the companies make 80 percent of the profits. Since everyone begins at pretty much the same starting point, why do some people manage to get so far ahead of the vast majority?
After years of study and experience, I've found the answer. In its simplest terms, successful people capitalize on their strengths. They either develop strengths that they already have or identify and develop strengths that they need to get ahead. They then focus all of their energies on getting better and better in one or two key areas. They take themselves out of the ranks of the ordinary performers and up to the ranks of extraordinary performers. And their rewards, both tangible and intangible, soon reflect their achievements.
Success comes from doing what you are ideally suited to do, doing it extremely well and doing more and more of it. This is also the key to health, happiness, prosperity and complete self-fulfillment.
One of the qualities of superior men and women is that they are extremely self-reliant. They accept complete responsibility for themselves and everything that happens to them. They look to themselves as a source of their successes and as the main cause of their problems and difficulties. High achievers say, "If it's to be, it's up to me." When things aren't moving along as fast as they want, they ask themselves, "What is it in me that is causing this problem?" They refuse to make excuses or to blame people. Instead, they look for ways to overcome obstacles and to make progress.
Totally self-responsible people look upon themselves as self-employed. They see themselves as the president of their own personal services corporation. They realize that no matter who signs their paycheck, in the final analysis they work for themselves. Because they have this attitude of self-employment, they take a strategic approach to their work.
To achieve everything you are capable of achieving as a person, you also most become a skilled strategic planner with regard to your life and work. But instead of aiming to increase your return on equity, your goal is to increase your return on energy.
Just as a company has financial capital, you have human capital. You have physical capital, emotional capital and intellectual capital. Of the three, intellectual capital is the most valuable. We live today in the information age. We do not earn our living by the sweat of our brows but, rather, by the quality of our thinking and our ability to get results by applying our minds. We live in a knowledge-based society, and your knowledge of how to get things done is the most valuable capital you can ever have.
Today, jobs and entire industries are being eliminated at a speed greater than anything ever experienced in all of history. All around us are tens of thousands of men and women whose jobs have been eliminated in the last few years, and this trend will continue at an accelerated rate. People who went to school and worked for years to develop their skills find that there is no longer a market for them, and the market is not coming back. The layoffs are permanent. The industries are gone. The jobs have disappeared.
Your most valuable financial asset is your earning ability, your ability to earn money. Properly applied to the marketplace, it's like a pump. By exploiting your earning ability, you can pump tens of thousands of dollars a year into your pocket. All your knowledge, education, skills and experience contribute toward your earning ability, your ability to get results for which someone will pay good money.
And your earning ability is like farmland. If you don't take excellent care of it, if you don't fertilize it and cultivate it and water it on a regular basis, it soon loses its ability to produce the kind of harvest that you desire. Successful men and women are those who are extremely aware of the importance and value of their earning ability, and they work every day to keep it growing and current with the demands of the marketplace.
One of the greatest responsibilities in life is to identify, develop and maintain an important marketable skill. It is to become very good at doing something for which there is a strong market demand.
In corporate strategy, we call this the development of a "competitive advantage." For a company, a competitive advantage is defined as an area of excellence in producing a product or service that gives the company a distinct edge over its competition.
There are four keys to the strategic marketing of yourself and your services.
The First Key is Specialization.
No one can be all things to all people. A "jack-of-all-trades" also is a "master of none." That career path usually leads to a dead end. Specialization is the key. Men and women who are successful have a series of general skills, but they also have one or two areas where they have developed the ability to perform in an outstanding manner.
Your decision about how, where, when and why you are going to specialize in a particular area of endeavor is perhaps the most important decision you will ever make in your career. It was well said that if you don't think about the future, you can't have one. The major reason why so many people are finding their jobs eliminated and finding themselves unemployed for long periods of time is because they didn't look down the road of life far enough and prepare themselves well enough for the time when their current jobs would expire.
In determining your area of specialization, put your current job aside for the moment, and take the time to look deeply into yourself. Analyze yourself from every point of view. Rise above yourself, and look at your lifetime of activities and accomplishments in determining what your area of specialization could be or should be.
You possess special talents and abilities that make you unique, different from anyone else who has ever lived. The odds of there being another person just like you are more than 50 billion to one. Your remarkable and unusual combination of education, experience, knowledge, problems, successes, difficulties and challenges, and your way of looking at and reacting to life, make you extraordinary. You have within you potential competencies and attributes that can enable you to accomplish virtually anything you want in life. Your main job is to decide which of your talents you're going to exploit and develop to their highest and best possible use right now.
So, what is your area of excellence? What are you especially good at right now? If things continue as they are, what are you likely to be good at in the future -- say one or two or even five years from now? Is this a marketable skill with a growing demand, or is your field changing in such a way that you are going to have to change as well if you want to keep up with it? Looking into the future, what could be your area of excellence if you were to go to work on yourself and your abilities? What should be your area of excellence if you want to rise to the top of your field, make an excellent living and take complete control of your financial future?
You can become almost anything you need to become, in order to accomplish almost anything you want to accomplish, if you simply decide what it is and then learn what you need to learn. This is such an obvious fact that most people miss it completely.
In looking at your current and past experiences for an area of specialization, one of the most important questions to ask yourself is, "What activities have been most responsible for my success in life to date?" How did you get from where you were to where you are today? What talents and abilities seemed to come easily to you? What things do you do well that seem be difficult for most other people? What things do you most enjoy doing? What things do you find most intrinsically motivating? What things make you happy when you are doing them?
In capitalizing on your strengths, your level of interest--excitement and enthusiasm about the particular job or activity--is a key factor. You'll always do best and make the most money in a field that you really enjoy. It will be an area that you like to think about and talk about and read about and learn about. Successful people love what they do, and they can hardly wait to get to it each day. Doing their work makes them happy, and the happier they are, the more enthusiastically they do it, and the better they do it as well.
The Second Key is Differentiation.
You must decide what you're going to do to be not only different but also better than your competitors in the field. Remember, you have to be good in only one specific area to move ahead of the pack. And you must decide what that area should be.
The Third Key is Segmentation.
You have to look at the marketplace and determine where you can best apply yourself, with your unique talents and abilities, to give yourself the highest possible return on energy expended. What customers, companies, markets, can best utilize your special talents and offer you the most in terms of financial rewards and future opportunities?
The Fourth Key is Concentration.
Once you have decided the area in which you're going to specialize, how are you going to differentiate yourself, and where in the marketplace you can best apply your strengths, your final job is to concentrate all of your energy on becoming excellent there. The marketplace pays extraordinary rewards only for extraordinary performance.
You have everything you need, right now, within you, to be and have and do anything you want. You have potential talents, skills and abilities just waiting to be developed, like great pools of oil underground. The rig you use to drill a gusher on your land is your decision to capitalize on your personal strengths--to look into yourself and determine what you are ideally suited to do, and then to throw your whole heart into doing it in an excellent fashion. When you do that, everything becomes possible for you.
* Think about the keys to strategic self-marketing -- specialization, differentiation, segmentation and concentration. Are you using these concepts to your fullest advantage?
