Taking Your Capabilities Seriously: The Entrepreneurial Formula For Usefulness, Success, And Happiness

We all have a unique combination of talents, skills, and aptitudes, but too few of us recognize them as unique or take them as seriously as we should.

We either assume everyone else can do what we do, or we don’t see the importance of focusing solely on what we’re best at. Some of us don’t feel like we have “permission” to do only what we love to do. But the truth is that we contribute so much more to the world when we take our capabilities seriously.

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A binary world.

When you take your unique capabilities seriously, and are clear and confident about what you do uniquely well, you gain an extraordinary opportunity to take advantage of some amazing, big system capabilities in the world that will propel you forward, encourage collaboration, and inspire you to put your unique capabilities to use.

It’s often been said that we’re in the binary world because the underlying digital code consists of ones and zeros. This can be applied to unique capabilities, where you either focus in on your unique capabilities, take complete responsibility for them, and then happily and successfully move forward in your life (1), or you don’t focus in on your unique capabilities, and you get bogged down in every manner of drama in the world, most of it negative and focused on comparison with others (0).

So, you’re either focused on your unique capabilities or you’re totally into the world of self-comparison—and there’s no happiness, success, or satisfaction in the world of self-comparison. You’re very much a victim with that mindset.

Choosing happiness or victimhood.

In a world where everyone takes their capabilities seriously, there’s no reason for feeling like a victim, and there’s no time for it because every day is exciting to you, and you’re using up all your time in the day in your area of unique capability.

My feeling is that everybody is capable of taking responsibility and ownership in truly valuing and therefore bringing their unique capabilities to life. And when they do, they’ll seek out other people who are doing this and will continually create an environment around them—a human environment—of collaborators who reinforce their unique capabilities. And their unique capabilities in turn become more useful to the people they’re collaborating with.

When people don’t take their capabilities seriously or see them as unique, the world is all about unfairness and injustice and victimhood. People complain and make excuses for their situations. The truth is that nobody arrives in the world in equal status with anyone else, but the question is, are you going to take personal responsibility for your life? Because I can guarantee you nobody else is going to.

Taking responsibility.

Everything you’re doing is your property. No one else has any ownership of what’s going on inside of you. I’ve gone through stages where, for periods of time, I felt sorry for myself and I said, “There’s no escape from this.” The only escape is to take responsibility.

A system has emerged on the planet over generations going back, a hundred thousand years where enough individuals took responsibility for their capabilities and have produced great things that helped everybody else. And each of us is absolutely alone in coming to grips with our unique capabilities. But if we show progress in this and take our capabilities seriously, we’ll get massive amounts of support from other people.

This is an incredible formula for usefulness, success, and happiness.

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