You have Unique Success Power. This is the unique combination of your talents, strengths, knowledge, abilities and more that make you a unique person, not exactly like anyone else. Here’s how to discover yours.
If you fully understand your Unique Success Power and how to focus it in the marketplace and relationships with others, your chances of achieving great success are high indeed. You will have the power to succeed. This article explains how to do that. (This post is an excerpt from my new book, How To Be Successful In Life: Discover and Use Your Unique Success Power. Available on Amazon in all formats.)
Hundreds if not thousands of books have been written about how to be successful in life. The oldest surviving book in the world, The Teachings of Ptahhotep[i], was written 5,000 years ago. It tells young Egyptians how to be successful in life and the royal courts.
I have read so many success books I can’t count them all. But the vast majority of them provided a success formula that was essentially one size fits all. The authors implied that you could be successful like them if you followed the same steps. Not one of them adequately explained how the reader could discover his or her Unique Success Power before providing a truly practical system for success in life and business. Let’s look at how you can discover your Unique Success Power (USP). It’s not super-simple, but if you follow along, you can certainly understand and make use of this valuable information.
Appreciate Your Uniqueness
It is extremely important for you to appreciate your uniqueness as you come to understand your Unique Success Power and develop your own Unique Success Power System. Do not be a copycat. Be authentically you. (This recommendation is the exact opposite of some success “gurus” who recommend that you find someone who is successful and imitate them.) Only a Success System based on your uniqueness is going to work, is going to last, is going to satisfy you now and in the future. You are indeed one of a kind in the entire worldand throughout all of history since the dawn of time. Consider this:
- Your genetic make-up is unique. You come from a long line of human beings going back hundreds of thousands of years. At no other time in all those years has anyone had the same genes as you do. You are the offspring of a unique mother and a unique father. You carry the genes of your unique grandparents, and so on, all the way back. You were born unique.
- Your brain is unique. This master-control center of your existence contains billions of neurons and recordings of your entire life history. Everything you know is physically located in your brain. No other person has a brain like yours.
- Your talents are unique. There is one thing or several things that you do better than other people. Maybe its athletics or music or other arts, writing or singing, organizing or executing, problem-solving or creative thinking, cooking or cleaning… the list is unlimited. You are probably not the only person in the world with your talents, but the combination of all of them along with your genetics and brain iscertainly
- Your body is unique. It’s pretty incredible that with all the world’s billions of people, no two are identical. Even so-called identical twins do not look identical to their parents or close friends. Subtle differences in facial expressions, ways of speaking and moving, and other physical factors set us apart from others. You may not be a movie star or a beauty queen, but you are uniquely beautiful! Treasure your uniqueness.
- So what does this mean? It means your capabilities for success are unique, and your best pathway to success will be unique. This is why my Unique Success Power System profoundly appreciates and accommodates the uniqueness of every person who seeks to use it for their own life success. Many other success systems instead present a one-size-fits-all formula that worked just fine for the author of the book but may not be a good fit for you at all! Think about that. It’s very important.
Analyzing Your Unique Success Power
As noted above, few if any success books provide an adequate process for evaluating the reader’s unique strengths. In the following content, you will find substantial depth on this topic. This is because I truly believe that only by understanding and building on your unique strengths can you achieve maximum success.
In traditional strategic planning, this analysis step is called Situation Analysis and involves identifying strengths and weaknesses of an organization. Personally, I dislike the word weaknesses and prefer to use the term gaps. A gap indicates an improvement you would like to make, but that doesn’t mean you have a weakness – in fact it can be a positive.
Now let’s analyze your current situation and your Unique Success Powers.
Analyze where you are on your key success factors
In a previous post, we introduced you to the 9 key success factors of life. Start analyzing your Unique Success Power by working through the nine key success factors and write down your strengths and gaps of each, using a clean sheet of paper, Word or Excel document:
- Mind
- Body
- Emotions
- Spirit
- People
- Things
- Work
- Leisure
- Environment
Be honest with yourself. Nobody is going to grade you on this work. But take the time to write it down on paper or a word processing document to get it out of your head. Of course you can review and think about this as much as you want later on.
A valuable part of understanding your Unique Success Power is understanding who you are as a unique individual. The more you understand yourself and define your own Unique Success Power System based on your strengths, the more likely your success will be. I highly recommend you use the following personal assessment tools to gain more self-awareness:
Analyze your unique personality
Through a combination of your subconscious and conscious brain functions, as well as your body and how you use it, there emerges a unique property called your personality. According to the American Psychological Association, “Personality refers to individual differences in characteristic patterns of thinking, feeling and behaving.” That sounds a lot like our four internal factors of mind, body, emotions and spirit – only they left out spirit, as most scientists do. Personality is the combination of things that make you a different kind of person from other people.
One valuable way to measure and describe your personality is through the Myers-Briggs personality (type) indicator. Although there is much more to the human brain and personality than this, the Myers-Briggs can be remarkably accurate in describing your personality type, determining what types of activities and jobs you would enjoy the most, and in general what type of success would be most appealing for you. I have found it a powerful tool counseling many people over the course of my career, as well as better understanding my own preferences for dealing with life and the world.
Having used and administered the Myers-Briggs for more than 30 years, I have seen how it can be a truly effective way to understand each person’s uniqueness and help them find their best fit in life and work. I highly recommend you take some form of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator now. This will help you as you follow along through developing your own Unique Success Power System. Go to Truity.com or any other “free myers briggs test” you find online and take their version of the Myers-Briggs; on Truity it is called TypeFinder. Be sure to print out your results and save them for future reference.
In case you are not familiar with it, the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator was developed by two Americans, Katharine Cook Briggs and her daughter Isabel Briggs Myers, based on the theories of Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung. Jung had speculated that people experience the world using four principal psychological functions – sensation, intuition, feeling, and thinking – and that one of these four functions is dominant for a person most of the time. The Myers-Briggs team expanded this into four continuums:
- Extraversion-Introversion—where you prefer to focus your
attention and get energy - Sensing-Intuition—how you prefer to take ininformation
- Thinking-Feeling—how you prefer to makedecisions
- Judging-Perceiving—how you orient yourself to the external world, preferring an organized approach or an open-spontaneous
Each of these eight terms has special meaning within the MBTI and should never be taken literally using dictionary definitions of those words. Let’s look at each one a little more closely:
The 8 Myers-Briggs Personality Characteristics
| Extravert – More oriented to the outer world of people and things. Energized by interacting with people. | Introvert – More oriented to the inner world of ideas and thought. Energized by peaceful time alone such as reading or thinking. |
| Sensing – More oriented to concrete facts, objects and things observable by the senses. | Intuitive – More oriented to possibilities and connections, including abstractions not observable by the senses. |
| Thinking – Making decisions based on impersonal analysis and logic | Feeling – Making decisions based more on personal values and feelings |
| Judging – Preferring to be well organized, a tendency to structure things into lists and timelines and to make fairly quick decisions | Perceiving – Preferring to remain open to possibilities, not be highly organized but rather checking possibilities and details before deciding |
Each person is considered to have one preferred quality from each continuum, producing a 4-letter type indicator like ESTJ or INFP, with 16 different types in all.
Odds are you do NOT have the same type as most other people you encounter, including your spouse or significant other. This is a major cause of confusion and conflict in relationships. As an example, pastor David T. Moore, who is a big fan of Myers-Briggs, gave a funny talk called, “Why Can’t You Be Normal – Like Me?” available on amazon.com in audio format.
Three other online “tests” or strength indicators can also be very helpful as you seek to understand your uniqueness:
- The VIA Character Survey at VIACharacter.org, which will help you understand your innate character, which is different from your personality type
- The CliftonStrengths Assessment developed by the Gallup organization, online at gallup.com/CliftonStrengths. This also shows another picture of your strengths different from Myers-Briggs or VIA. CliftonStrengths is not free but focuses on four “domains” very relevant to the workplace: strategic thinking, relationship building, influencing and executing.
- The Big 5 personality test, which some psychologists and academicians prefer over Myers-Briggs because it has been shown to be astatistically accurate predictor based on research studies. I have not used it with clients because one of the “Big 5” personality factors is neuroticism. Even if many people have neuroticism, I consider it a very negative term for group One reason I prefer the Myers-Briggs is that there are no negative factors. All types are “good,” and everyone can use the results in a positive, constructive manner. However, the Big 5 provides a level of detail which Myers-Briggs does not. It can provide valuable insights for your self-assessment and allows easy online comparison with the results of others such as a spouse or family member who take it at about the same time. It can be especially valuable for couples or relationship therapy in the hands of a skilled therapist. Like the Myers-Briggs, you can find free versions of the Big 5 Personality Test online.
The more you understand your personality type, character and strengths, the better you can chart a course for your life and work that is compatible with who you are, your unique strengths and preferences. This increases the likelihood that you will enjoy greater success and happiness as a result. This is extremely important, and the reason I recommend that you start your success journey or your “system building” by getting to know yourself.
Be sure to get your own copy of “How To Be Successful In Life: Discover and Use Your Unique Success Power for Maximum Results” – on sale now!
[i] You can use this (affiliate) link if desired: https://www.truity.com/?a=53464
[ii] https://care-clinics.com/did-you-know-that-most-emotions-last-90-seconds/
[iii] Available on amazon.com: https://amzn.to/3JS5d8H
Top Photo by Zac Durant on Unsplash