Page 128 - 100 Ways to Motivate Yourself

performance, not your feelings.

91. Exploit your weakness

Make a list of your strengths and your weaknesses on separate pieces of
paper. Place the list of strengths somewhere where you’ll see it again, because it
will always pick you up. Now look at your list of weaknesses and study them for
a while. Stay with them until you feel no shame or guilt about them. Allow them
to become interesting characteristics, instead of negative traits. Ask yourself how

each characteristic could be useful to you. That’s not what we usually ask about
our weaknesses, but that’s my whole point.

When I was a boy, I remember watching a remarkable tap dancer by the
name of “Peg Leg Bates” on the Ed Sullivan show. Bates had lost his leg early in
life, a circumstance that would lead most people to give up any dreams of
becoming a professional dancer. But to Bates, losing a leg was not a weakness
for long. He made it his strength. He put a tap at the bottom of his peg leg and
developed an amazing syncopated tap-dancing style. Obviously, he stood apart
from other dancers in auditions, and it wasn’t long before his weakness became
his strength.

Master fundraiser Michael Bassoff has dazzled the development world by
turning unappreciated staff members into great fundraisers. He, too, likes
people’s weaknesses, because he knows that they can be turned into strengths. If
there is a “shy” secretary in the development office he’s working with, he turns
that person into the staff’s “best listener.” Soon donors can’t wait to talk to that
person because she listens so well and makes people feel so important.

One of my weaknesses early in life was my difficulty in talking to people. I
had no confidence in my ability to speak and converse, so I got in the habit of
writing people letters and notes. After a while, I got so practiced with it that I

turned it into a strength. My letter writing and thank-you notes have created
many relationships for me that would not have been created if I’d just focused on
my shyness as a weakness.

I have four children, but I didn’t begin having children until I was 35 years
old. For a long time I saw myself as being “older than normal” to be a father. I
worried about it. I wondered if my son or daughters would be uncomfortable
with a father so old. And then I realized that this didn’t have to be a weakness. I