Recognizing and writing down your gifts is as important, if not more important, than writing down your goals. Writing down your goals is a useful tool to work concretely towards achieving your dreams and visions. Recognizing your gifts and callings is what creates those dreams and visions in the first place, and nurtures a positive and strength-based attitude.

Successful individuals focus on their gifts and strengths, not their weaknesses or flaws. Everyone has his or her areas of strength. Successful people learn to use their assets to their advantage, and realistically minimize or work around their deficits.

Every human being is born with varying degrees of potential – but all of us also have natural talents and abilities that, over time, become unique to us depending on our latent ability, our environment, our personality, our experiences, and all the millions of influences that affect human beings.

Everyone is good at something, and there is no one who is not good at anything! So we need to focus on those unique positives, and try to work in our areas of personal gifting: music, art, baking, sports, carpentry, cooking, cleaning, listening skills, public speaking, teaching, leadership – the list could go on forever. Allow what is good in you to get out and work for you.

Once you have made a list of your gifts – and feel free to ask others who know you well what they think your special gifts are – take a look at the list. Of the many gifts, what are you really passionate about?

What stands out as something you really love doing that connects with you?

Once you have narrowed it down, start thinking of how to direct your gifts and passion. Filling a need in your community, or the community beyond, with the particular set of gifts that you’ve been given, the passion to pursue them and taking action to make your dreams come true: that is where you will find success.

Individual gifts + personal passion + action = success for everyone.

Jeff Say's: I'm all for learning new things, however, if there is something that you’re already good at you’ll see more return on investment if you perfect your craft rather than focusing on things that don’t come easily to you.