Creating balanced success is achieved by possessing the willingness and know-how to identify and modify our weaknesses. Keep in mind the word potential means it hasn’t happened yet.
The quickest and most effective path to improved results isn’t in increasing the time and effort already spent on the same old activities.
The fastest way to move forward is through finding and fixing the weaknesses that have the highest payoff returns.
For instance, a person in sales may be an expert at explaining his product but really limps along in creating new opportunities for business.
Over the years I’ve met a lot of self-proclaimed great salespeople who are starving. They can tell you all about their product and their competition but they can’t tell you where their next five sales are coming from.
To put this need for balance into perspective I’ll share with you a personal story. I’m at the gym, in the weight room and I hear this moaning coming from down the hall. The best way I can describe it is…it sounded like a man giving birth. There was a number attached to each moan four, five, it seem like the walls were reverberating with every numeral. I couldn’t resist but to walk out of the room I was in, walk several feet down the hall, and there I was standing in the doorway of a room I’ve never been in. This was the heavy weight room. I was standing about ten feet away from a man on a bench press. Now this guy had a barrel chest. He had a neck the size of my waist, in fact…he had no neck, it was just two ears attached to shoulders. He had a bar with weights that looked like manhole covers against his chest with two guys the size of Kodiak bears spotting him. Now he would vocalize this long drawn out moan with ever life “eight, nine” all the way to fifteen. By the time he was finished he was dripping sweat and totally exhausted. After a few minutes he catches his breath, gathers his strength and slowly stands up. He has this large upper body mass of muscle. He looked like a hairy Michelin man with one exception, he had these bird legs, which were possibly regular sized man legs, but they were totally out of proportion with the rest of his body. I was waiting for him to start to lean to one side and not be able to catch himself and just topple over. I wondered if when he got home if he posed in front of a mirror that only reflected his body from the waist up.
The point I’d like to make is this, with all the time and effort he was putting out at the gym, was it helping him improve his health or total body appearance? In the world of body building he could never be Mr. Universe. No matter how much effort he puts forth improving the areas that were already developed.
How many of us put vast amounts of time and energy into talents and abilities that we are already doing well and ignore the areas that would make the biggest difference in our progress and our life.
Sometimes we have these mental mirrors that keep us from seeing the total picture. We need to have the courage and the ability to see the picture as clearly as possible and address the weaker parts of our talents abilities and character. Or the weaker parts of the plan we are hoping to succeed with.
Whether it is the design of the plan, personal habits, attitudes, or areas of a work team, to identify and modify weaknesses gives us the biggest breakthroughs and captures the most opportunities.
Most often it’s not necessary to have big fixes. Keep in mind the truth that big doors swing on small hinges. Those small changes very often possess the difference between being stuck or making progress, success or failure.
We don’t have to be great at everything, there are many things we are much better off delegating, we can’t ignore doing the important things well.
We need to keep finding ways to get the high payoff activities done effectively.
You can only drop so many balls before it costs you the game.