How to Build a Career on Your Strengths

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The average person spends most of their life at work. Won’t it be miserable if we worked in places we neither like nor are good for? Places where we are merely getting by and aren’t making significant contributions?

Having a remarkable career [and life] requires us to do work that is based on our passion and strengths. We will need to understand what we are passionate about and what we are good at, and how they can be translated into a good life and career.

For you reading this, maybe you don’t know your strengths (I didn’t know mine till a few weeks ago even though I thought I did), you can find them out and draw out a plan to build a life on them.

The truth remains, it’s not every career you can succeed in. I, for one, can’t succeed as an accountant, economist or data scientist. I hate numbers and suck at manipulating them. But I’m good with words, I’m good with understanding human behavior and predicting outcomes based on my observations. I’m good with motivating people. Maybe these strengths don’t mean anything to you, but they mean everything to me. They have gotten me this far and will take me further. The same goes for you, you have come this far, partly because of your strengths, and you will only go further based on what you do with them.

How do I identify my strengths?

I spent the better part of the last two months trying to identify what I am good at. After reading Robin Ryan’s Soaring On Your Strengths, I was able to understand myself better. Now I can make better career decisions. You too can do the same. Know your strengths and use them; know your limits and ignore them.

Identifying what you’re good at is a straightforward process. I recommend you take some alone time to think this through. Get a notepad and a pen and start listing out all the things you are good at. Don’t leave anything out. At first, you may think you’re not good at anything, so you can ask your friends to help you out. I mean, your close friends and maybe family members who know you through and through. Here are examples of things you can write down (if they apply to you):

• Good, active listener
• Public speaking
• Engaging conversationalist
• Motivating and inspiring people
• Looking at processes and improving them
• Leadership experience
• Crunching numbers, etc.

Once you’re done making that list, you’re ready to take the next step. I advise you to write down at least 10 things, no matter how mundane anyone of them may seem. Use those examples listed above to assess yourself. You don’t have to write down any of those qualities if you don’t have them. The point of the exercise is not to make you feel good. Don’t write down what you wish you had, write down what you do have.

PS: Your strengths are your talents, everyone has a talent.

Identify your core competencies

After listing down your strengths and talents (read: what you’re good at), you must point out your core competencies.

Among all your strengths and talents, there are some that you must have mastered and gotten better at over the years. You need to recognize them and write them down.

For me, I noted down writing, leadership abilities and interpersonal skills. Recognizing them as core competencies has helped me know what the next step in my career should be.

What is your ideal job/career like?

This took me some time to draft out, but I finally did it. I was able to come up with a satisfactory description of what my ideal job would look like. And as you might have guessed, such a job doesn’t exist at the moment; I’m working to make sure it does exist by the time I’m 30.

Your turn. What is the ideal job/career you have in mind? To help you understand this better, describe what an ideal work day should be like for you. What do you want to be doing at work everyday?

Once you’re done with that, you need to draw up a timeline, if you aren’t already working at your ideal job. How many years do you want to spend walking the road to your ideal job/career? Write it down. In what position do you see yourself at the end of the allotted time? Write that down too.

Identify the current jobs/entrepreneurial opportunities that require your core competencies

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Reality is this: you have to start from the known to get to the unknown. If your ideal job doesn’t exist yet, you have to start from one that exists. This step requires you to do some research. Find out the current jobs, careers or entrepreneurial ventures that require your core competencies. If graphic designing is one of your core competencies, then you should look for a place that requires it: maybe a design firm, the product design department, an ad/marketing agency, etc.

There is always a ready market for your core competencies, look for a way to get into that market. This pretty much means you might have to work freelance, work as a volunteer or start your own venture. The advice in this article isn’t limited to ‘jobs’ alone, entrepreneurs can also use them.

Map out a detailed plan for getting your job/starting something up

The next step in this process is for you to draw up a detailed plan showing how you’re going to go about your job, from the one on ground to the ideal one; or how you will go about your ideal entrepreneurial venture. Start from the smallest and easiest step and work your way up to the toughest and most seemingly impossible task: go from how you’re going to get the job to what you’re going to do on the job.

Each step must be accompanied with a timeline and an objective. Write down how long you plan to send on each step. The objective will explain why you are taking the step and what you hope to achieve with it. As I explained in my article about self motivation, break the process into small steps. This will give you the push needed to go from one step to another.

How do you know when you’ve achieved success?

Now that you have drawn out your plan, you need to describe what success at each stage will look like for you. How will you know when you have succeeded? What do you picture your life will look like when you have attained the level of success you’re aiming for? What kind of life do you think you will be living then?

Write down all these things as they will help to guide your decisions as you look at them from time to time, over the coming years.

What do you want your whole life to be like?

One of the best things I’ve ever done was to write my eulogy. I read about that in Rob Yeung’s The New Rule: Emotional Intelligence. What do you want people to say about you at the end of your life? In this context, the people who will work with you over the course of your life, what do you want them to say about you at your funeral? Write that down and try your best to use it as a beacon for your decisions.

All these steps are important. I have curated knowledge from dozens of books and materials I have read over the years. They have worked for me and millions of other people.

So, tell me, what’s your ideal career like? And what do you think you can do to get there?