Knowing What You Were Built For

Some questions just have to be answered for Life to have meaning. The earlier these questions are answered, the better. It is not unusual to find child prodigies expressing raw talent at a very young age.

This inner gifting takes shape as the child becomes a teenager often following a path that was orchestrated by an older mentor or guide.

This process of self-discovery is easier when it is initiated by parents or by a third party with the consent of the parents. However, this process may either be truncated or the environment might just not present the opportunities for the child to discover herself or himself. 

The result? A society full of people who are just doing jobs or businesses because they need to be able to pay the bills and put food on the table. A good number of them are dissatisfied with what they call a job. Their daily routine is a grind, yet most of them know deep inside, this is not what they were built for. They struggle with their fundamental chores at work.

Once in a while their eyes light up in excitement when they come across a product or service rendered by someone who has turned a talent that they themselves have into a revenue-generating skill. They tell themselves, "I can do that!" A friend on facebook does an art work and gets 69 likes in less that 2 minutes of posting and they go "meeeeeeeeehn!" 

Two things seem to stand in their way. Firstly, their current dissatisfying career does not afford them the luxury of time to develop their talent into a skill that can add value to potential clients. Secondly, they fear that this natural talent of theirs may not be able to bring in enough money to take care of the needs that their jobs manage to cater for.

This article seeks to answer the questions of those who for some reasons other than the one listed above do not know what their talent is. This class of people say stuff like "I enjoy doing so many things" or "There is nothing I do that I really love"

The discovery process will call for a lot of patience and a very observant attitude. Whatever talent it is that answers ALL these questions at the same time is worth pursuing. Yes you may need to save some money from your current job to be able to start small but you need to start. Why? That's because it is the ONLY thing you will enjoy doing. Who does not want stuff they enjoy doing? Okay here are some of the questions that can tell you what you were built for.

1. What is it that once you start doing it, you enjoy yourself?

Time just seems to come to a halt. Even you cannot explain it. It is like piece of cake for you but an uphill task for some others. You encounter challenges while doing it but the solutions seem to be within reach all the time even though it may take a while.

2. What is that You can willingly do even if you were sure you will not get paid for it? Yes this heavily contrasts with your current job where you look forward to the pay cheque at the end of the month or whatever agreed contract period. 

3. What value adding activity makes it look like whatever time you spend in doing it is NOT ever enough?

You start on time or even before time but for some reason it looks like The Creator suddenly fast forwards time to ensure the finishing time comes sooner than expected? The illusion that time flies!

4. What exercise can make you forgo food for hours and in extreme cases days? All discomfort seems to vanish and hunger flies out the window once you are engaged in delivering this gift. You need to take note. That is your domain...that is YOUR LAND!

5. What activity leaves you tired but satisfied and leaves the recipients of the benefits of such activity even more satisfied? It is your perfect getaway. You maybe tired from the day's work but once you start, you just go on and on and on that a fully loaded machine gun connected to an inexhaustible magazine of armoury! Someone may have made you angry previously but this activity seems to make you forget in a hurry whatever the issue was!

6. What exercise will you continue doing even after the client insults you midway? You know one of those days when the client is upset and transfers the aggression on you for no reason other than that you were the first person they cam across since the occurrence of the annoying event.

7. Which activity seems to energize you to engage in it and leaves you giving the client more than the value agreed on? You just do not want to stop and sometimes get depressed whenever you have to stop. When your client does not see your passion or shares the same value you seem to get visibly upset. Note this is different from times when the client is not enjoying your mode of gift delivery. At such times you need to find out what it is you are not doing right and fix it for better customer satisfaction.

Now when you find that gift or exercise or activity or skill, follow it! Develop it! One day you will get enough momentum and money to switch to pursuing it passionately and totally neglect everything else that competes for your time. You will succeed. I know it!

What Really Makes People Disruptive?

Here is my pick for today. It from one of my favourite authors on inc.
Malcolm Gladwell on What Really Makes People Disruptive
The best-selling author says it's not tech, money, or brainpower. Successful disrupters all tend to have one huge precondition that's far more important.
By Jill Krasny
Staff writer, Inc.@jillkrasny


When people talk about what it takes to transform a field or a world, they leave out one crucial component, best-selling author Malcolm Gladwell told the audience at the World Business Forum on Tuesday. "What's really behind it?" he said. "What are the preconditions that make that kind of change possible?"

Too often, he said, the list of explanations is short. "We talk about the importance of technology and knowledge and resources, having the kind of money to make it happen," he said, "but we don't talk about frame of mind--attitude. The kinds of attitudes that lie behind provocateurs."

Using the powerful story of shipping magnate Malcolm McLean, Gladwell revealed how having the right attitude is critical to effecting great change. As Gladwell explained, McLean was the sort of guy who didn't show many emotions. He grew up in poverty during the Great Depression and dropped out of school at age 16. But when he went to work at a gas station and learned he could earn $5 a week just for shipping in oil from far away, he volunteered to help his boss, and this changed the course of history.

McLean's fuel-trucking gig led him to become something of a leader in the trucking space. He was the first guy to suggest using diesel fuel and the first guy to find the most efficient driving routes. He was also the first guy to spend 20 years thinking of ways to make shipping more efficient.

Here was the problem: Shipping took forever, and so did loading and unloading the cargo. In fact, it cost so much to ship that many multinational companies that could have gotten rich from expansion didn't even bother with it, said Gladwell. On top of that, docks were often controlled by organized crime or run through unions, and there were problems of theft to contend with.
By the mid-1950s, when McLean was already a household name among American truckers, he decided to switch industries. He sold off his trucking business, and after a few false starts came up with the idea of making the back of a trailer retractable so the cargo could easily load on and off a ship. In April 1956, the plan worked, and the free and inexpensive movement of freight from one country to the next was born.
So what made McLean such a rousing success? He certainly wasn't educated, and he knew next to nothing about shipping. McLean had a background in trucking, which was considered a whole separate field in those days. But McLean did have three things going for him, Gladwell said, something Steve Jobs and other visionaries had in spades.

The Beauty of Being Disagreeable
Everyone thought McLean was crazy. He sold off a successful business, and the idea of using containers in shipping wasn't new--people had been experimenting with them for 30 years and failed miserably. Containers were so heavy they drove up costs, plus they were cumbersome to load. Longshoremen hated the very idea of them. It didn't help matters that McLean had "mortgaged himself to the hilt," Gladwell said, or that shipping was a capital-intensive business, which trucking was not. But McLean, like most underdogs, could not have cared less. He was "completely indifferent to what people said about him," Gladwell said, which is "the first and foundational fact to understand these disrupters. They are what psychologists call disagreeable--they do not require the approval of their peers in order to do what they think is correct."

Reframing the Problem
Everyone also thought McLean wasn't seeing the whole picture. People who worked in trucking, railways, and docks had all kinds of ideas on how to solve the problem. Trouble was, they were the ones who could not see the whole picture. They thought of solutions in terms of how it would make their jobs easier, only reframing individual components. Conversely, McLean wanted to reframe it all. As Gladwell explained, people said he couldn't design containers that were too heavy, so he redesigned the connection between the trucks and the box. People said he needed a crane to lift the containers onto the dock, so he thought of a railway line to help the cranes move up and down the ship.
"Successful disrupters are people who are capable of an active imagination," said Gladwell. "They begin reimagining their world by reframing the problem in a way no one had framed it before."

Removing Constraints
When longshoremen saw what was happening, they went on strike. McLean was fine with that. He figured he could use the time to retrofit his ships and bring in larger containers. However, if he wanted to use heavier containers, he was going to need a stronger crane. So he went to a nearby crane company and asked for one that could carry about 35,000 pounds--also, he would need it in 90 days. The company flat-out told him no.

Undeterred, McLean got to thinking. What if a lumber company's crane maker could help? After all, they used cranes and carried large loads all the time. It seemed like a good idea, so McLean flew to Washington State to find out. "Can you build me a crane?" he asked the crane maker. "Sure," they said. "And can I have it in 90 days?" The crane maker told him he wouldn't even have to wait--they would send one right over that afternoon. "You could see by reframing the problem, that frees him up," said Gladwell. But why insist on getting the crane in 90 days?
Well, that reason is simple. Like a certain entrepreneur who had just seen the graphical user interface at Xerox Parc and wanted to build one of his own, McLean wanted to get it done, now. It had nothing to do with his vision or insight. Not even his brains or resources, said Gladwell.

Like Steve Jobs, McLean believed in his vision. What set him apart was not what was in his head or his pocket--"it was in his heart," said Gladwell. Thanks. I hope you enjoyed the read. Please feel free to drop comments on what we could do here to improve and we will act on them.