Managing Oneself

Summary

To work effectively, you must know in what conditions of work you are most suited to. Identify your strengths and play to them, seeking to improve them and engaging in situations where they can be best utilised. You must know how you best perform; how you can most effectively learn, produce results and what role you are most suited to. Find your values and convey them to those you work with, engaging in environments that hold similar values.

Examine situations based on what you are able to offer, give your traits, and how best you can make an impact. Take responsibility for gaining and sharing this knowledge of how you best perform so that others are able to adhere to it and collaborate in ways they best perform.

Actionable Takeaways

1. Identify your strengths and maximise them; Engage it situations that utilise them and improve them. Then discover any unwarranted intellectual arrogance associated and remedy it.
2. Determine how you best perform; how you best learn, work and communicate.
3. Determine your values.
4. Discover the ways in which those you rely on work; their strengths, performance modes and values, so that you can maximise effectiveness. Take responsibility for gaining and sharing this knowledge.

Favourite Quotes

One should waste as little effort as possible on improving areas of low competence. It takes far more energy and work to improve from incompetence to mediocrity than it takes to improve from first-rate performance to excellence.

Just as people achieve results by doing what they are good at, they also achieve results by working in ways that they best perform.

Do not try to change yourself—you are unlikely to succeed. But work hard to improve the way you perform. And try not to take on work you cannot perform or will only perform poorly.

It is a law of nature that two moving bodies in contact with each other creates friction. This is as true for human beings as it is inanimate objects.