Do you laugh about yourself?

Develop your top strengths, annihilate your worst weaknesses.

I come to think of this again and again as of lately. It’s from a seminar we had a couple years ago and was used for an analysis of the youth organization we worked in. These days, I like to apply it to my personal life.

Dont’s

• Don’t aim to be perfect.
• Don’t try to get everything right.
• Don’t try to be as good as the competetion in every field.

Does

• Work on being exceptionally good at one thing.
• Work on getting everything else done good enough.

So what?

If you have one thing that you do exceptionally good, people will think of you, they will talk about you and they will remember you for it. So work on what you do best (develop your top strengths) and for the rest, just try to get it good enough not to scare people away (annihilate your worst weaknesses).

If you do everything mediocre you’ll not be an interesting choice. You’ll be replaceable for every specific task by someone who can do better, and your “overall performance” really isn’t interesting enough to get you a mark in anyone’s records.

Doing one thing better than most people gives you the freedom to hang loose on other things.

If you do something really, really horrible, you’ll scare people away. You can be the most eloquent and fun party guy, but you cannot just randomly insult people – intentionally or not. On the other hand, you don’t have to be mr. charming if you’re most eloquent and funny.

And how about you?

You can’t be everyone’s darling, and you cannot do everything right for everyone. It’s your top strengths people will appreciate and respect you for, your worst weaknesses offering everyone (including yourself) to have a good laugh at your cost, and everything inbetween to make you the person you are.

How often do you laugh about yourself?

Forget perfect. Perfect is boring.