Turn 3 Weaknesses into Strengths
On a sunny Saturday morning in Chicago this weekend, I was hanging out in a massive hotel conference room listening Dan Kennedy talk about my favorite topic – Productivity.
And he made a point I hadn’t thought of before.
He explained that 70% of our time management problem is simply due to insufficient motivation or pressure to get the work done.
You know, that’s probably true. We can have all the time management tools in the world to help us block our time and schedule our day, but the reality is most people just don’t have the discipline to stick to it.
The reason why most people struggle to get stuff done is that they just don’t have a good enough reason to finish it.
Their life is good enough right now, and oh well, if they don’t get their e-book done it’s not like American Idol won’t still be on TV.
It’s just like a diet.
Diets work, they aren’t rocket surgery…but they require a large amount of internal motivation to follow one.
But we are weak.
Now to be honest, I can’t fix your lack of internal motivation. That’s something ONLY you can change. I can only work on my own weaknesses, of which I have many.
So here’s a deep look into how I’ve turned serious weaknesses into strengths. I hope you don’t have the first two, but you probably have the third one, and that’s where you’ll get some valuable take-away tips to implement today.
My Weakness #1 – Addiction
I come from a family that suffers from addiction. My father was an alcoholic, and his brother was an alcoholic and cigarette smoker. Both had their lives shortened because of it.
I have no intentions of going down that road, but if there really is a gene for addiction, then I guess I have to be addicted to something, right?
If so, then I’m at least going to pick my poison. So I choose knowledge. And by doing so, I channel my weakness into a strength.
Now given the chance, I’d read five newspapers each day, followed by three hours of newspaper websites.
Needless to say I fight that urge everyday, and instead seek out knowledge that will help me grow my business and be productive, such as marketing seminars, books, and courses.
That’s how my weakness becomes strength.
My Weakness #2 – Laziness
My next biggest weakness is that I am utterly lazy. In fact, I am so lazy that I worked 12 hours per day when I was younger in order to avoid working.
I’m serious. What I mean is I’m just not a fan of manual labor. I’m also mechanically inept, which doesn’t help.
Plus 7 years of hard labor earning minimum wage at a local greenhouse & nursery, digging ditches in the hot sun and mixing soil all day long, among other chores, was enough to convince me that I should find another line of work.
So I channeled my weakness – being too lazy for manual labor – into a focus on building a business based around what I liked to do – read, write, and think.
That’s why I’ve worked for 18 years to perfect my Lifestyle Design 101. I now do what I want, when I want (like writing these emails at 6am every day.)
My Weakness #3 – No tech skills
I can barely figure out ITunes (just about had a meltdown yesterday and almost smashed my computer trying to transfer music onto my ipod).
But in reality, that’s VERY good news for someone running their own website business.
You see, the money is not made through technological knowledge. You can hire that. Cheap, too. So the simple solution to this weakness is to outsource.
Do NOT spend hours and hours figuring out how to create websites. In fact, I’d say that having tech skills will HINDER your business.
I even made up my own rule, Ballantyne’s Law, which states:
The more technical expertise you have about such things as wordpress, shopping carts, etc., the LESS money you’ll make.
The guys I know who are making 7-figures with their website business have little idea what’s going on with their websites.
They know what CAN be done, and they know what they want to be done, but they have no idea HOW it is done.
Instead, they hire someone else to deal with the how, and they focus on the big ideas that will make them $$$.
You can find cheap website help on these sites:
Upwork.com
Guru.com
And even Craigslist.com
So turn your tech weakness into a strength by NOT ever trying to improve your tech weakness, and instead delegate the tech tasks to someone else.
After all, tech help is manual labor.
Focus on your strengths,
Craig Ballantyne
InternetIndependence.com
There will be days when you struggle, and it seems like nothing is going to go right, but that is okay. Just never give up! Realize everyone else goes through this, and not quitting is what separates the winners from the losers. Never, ever, EVER give up.