Wednesday, February 21, 2007

Don't like it? Don't do it.

Marcus Buckingham’s new book, Go Put Your Strengths To Work (Free Press), arrived the other day. I interviewed him for an article in Selling Power about this time last year, as he was driving his kids to the San Diego Zoo. I wanted his advice on how to sustain peak performance. He said:


If you want to experience and sustain levels of personal best, then you have got to find out what you don’t like doing and have the discipline to cut that out of your life. The funny thing about success, initial success, is that it brings with it more opportunities, more complexities, more choices. Some of those are going to play to your strengths, but many of them won’t. And if you are not quite careful, you may well end up spending a disproportionate amount of your time doing things you really don’t like to do. So the trick is to have the insight, first of all, to identify which things grate on you or frustrate you or drain you and then, have the creativity and the discipline to cut them out of your life.

Buckingham’s new book offers a process for achieving that insight and discipline. It’s something of a multimedia extravaganza; each copy includes a personal code for an online Strengths Engagement Track assessment and access to downloadable, filmed versions of the first two chapters of the book. Buckingham’s process is also the subject of a one-hour PBS special airing in March.

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