TDW #051: Reclaiming Your Strengths

Issue At-A-Glance:

• Quote: future you
• Tweet: respect yourself
• Thought: get strong again
• Surprise: AI captions

Read Time: 4 minutes

Different Quote

Rather than having goals that are reactive to your current context, it is far more powerful to mentally create the context you want, which is way beyond your current context, and use your future vision to drive your actions.

via Dr. Ben Hardy

Different Tweet

This is one of the family values I wrote for my kids.

So often we get caught up in worrying about what others think about our choices we never take the time to consider what we think about our own choices.

I like asking myself before a decision — big or small — "if I make this decision, in this way, will I still have respect for myself?"

To respect others we must first respect ourselves. 

For more thoughts like this, follow me on Twitter here >>

Different Thought

Strength to Weakness to Strength: Reclaiming Your Strengths

The little orange stickers filled me with dread every single day.

I got in a lot of trouble in 5th and 6th grade. I could never sit still. I was always drawing when I should have been listening. Some might call it ADHD. I call it “just needing to move.”

“Sit still, Justin.”

“Don’t move, Justin.”

“Go back to your chair, Justin.”

It was like torture.

So my teachers devised a plan to keep me in my seat. Orange stickers. Lined up in two rows. Five stickers per row.

10 chances every day to blow it.

See, every time I got out of my seat when I wasn't supposed to, my teacher came over and took an orange sticker away.

Three stickers gone in a day meant a time out.

Five stickers gone meant two time outs.

It also meant I had to write a "report" on what I did wrong and how I would change my actions so it didn't happen again.

You have to understand, this was like asking a fish to explain why they swim in water.

Or why kids love candy.

Or even how two people fall in love.

Kids have to move. Period. When you stick them in a seat for hours on end and ask them to sit still, it's a recipe for failure.

The orange stickers trained me to look at my strengths as failures.

I loved to draw and doodle and sketch. But whenever I did this in class, I always got in trouble.

I loved to move and talk to other students and connect. But I got reprimanded for doing so every day.

Do you understand this?

Many of us have been conditioned to see our biggest strengths as our biggest failures. This is how the world trains us. To fit inside the boxes and play nice and go along to get along.

The world trains us to fail.

And that's what the orange stickers meant.

Failure.

This system didn't work. Not once. It prevented nothing.

The only thing it did was fill me with dread and worry. I can still remember the pit in my stomach when one of those orange stickers took flight.

• I failed!
• I'm gonna die!
• I'm gonna get grounded!

And probably the most sinister...

Who I am is not good...there is something wrong with me!

No one was doing this intentionally, of course. My teacher had other students to worry about. She just wanted to get through the day. The last thing she wanted to do was chase me around the classroom.

I don't blame her.

At 43, I am just NOW learning how to recognize the orange sticker damage.

I take 1-2 walks per day. Just to move. Just to walk and think and create momentum. No more sitting still.

I have a giant whiteboard in my office. I sketch out nearly everything. My notebooks are full of diagrams and charts and doodles.

Strength turned into weakness turning back into strength.

A mentor once told me, “The world mocks us in the area of our greatest gift.”

The point is, we need to embrace our strengths and use them to our advantage.

We need to find ways to turn them into assets, rather than trying to suppress them and turn them into weaknesses.

It's not about conforming to the norm, it's about celebrating what makes us unique and using it to our advantage.

So go ahead and try to take my orange stickers — they don't define me anymore.

Different Surprise

Pretty much any short form video has captions these days. I think I read somewhere that 60-70% of users never turn on the audio for videos!

Hormozi. Mr. Beast. Gary Vee. All legends in the space. All of 'em use captions.

Submagic creates captions for your vids automatically and styles them to look super professional — with the help of our soon-coming robotic overlords, aka A-I.

Absolutely killer.

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