~by Haley Lynn Gray~
My best tip for living is to know yourself — honestly, without the version you’d prefer.
You might assume from some of my posts that I keep an immaculate home. Nothing could be further from the truth. There is a pile of toys waist-high behind me as I type, because I did some Christmas shopping and dropped it inside the door to deal with later. Last night I went through a bathroom cabinet and found things from 2003.
I love to cook — a few times a year. For most of the rest of it, I forget the kitchen exists.
The questions worth answering
What are you genuinely good at? What are you bad at? What do you enjoy, and what do you avoid?
Then the more interesting ones:
What do you think you’re bad at that others think you’re excellent at? Most people have at least one — usually something that comes so easily they assume it’s easy for everyone.
What do you do badly but love doing anyway? Keep those. Not everything has to be optimised.
And what are you carrying because you think you should? That’s where most of the wasted effort lives.
Why the hard years teach it fastest
I got a very clear picture of my own strengths and limits during a stretch of dealing with my parents’ failing health while doing an MBA and working full time.
When capacity is abundant, you can be vague about what you’re good at — there’s room to be mediocre at several things. When it isn’t, the truth arrives quickly: what you can do well under pressure, what collapses, and what you should simply never have taken on.
Unpleasant, and clarifying.
What to do with the answers
Build the business around the strengths. The work you’re happiest doing is usually your highest-value work — that’s not a coincidence, and as an owner you can design your role around it.
Hire or buy the rest. Not everything needs improving. Some things need handing to someone who’s good at them, and that’s a decision rather than a defeat.
Stop apologising for the parts that don’t matter. My bathroom cabinets are not a moral failing. Neither is the toy pile.
And be honest about the gaps that do matter. If you’re bad with numbers and you own a business, that one you address — with a bookkeeper, a system, or actually learning it.
The short version
Know what you’re excellent at, what you’re hopeless at, and which of the hopeless ones matter.
Then arrange your life and your business around the truth rather than the aspiration. It’s considerably less tiring, and it works better.
