If your senses are numbed with delusion and denial, you will stop looking for these true strengths and wind up living a second-rate version of someone's life rather than a worldclass version of your own

There is one sure way to identify your greatest potential for strength: Step back and watch yourself for a while. Try an activity and see how quickly you pick it up, how quickly you skip steps in the learning and add twists and kinks you haven't been taught yet. See whether you become absorbed in the activity to such an extent that you lose track of time. If none of these has happened after a couple of months, try another activity and watch-and another. Over time your dominant talents will reveal themselves, and you can start to refine them into a powerful strength.

Each of these strategies-get a little better at it, design a support system, use one of your strongest themes to overwhelm your weakness, find a partner, and just stop doing it-can help you as you strive to build your life around your strengths.

From this point of view, to avoid your strengths and to focus on your weaknesses isn't a sign of diligent humility. It is almost irresponsible. By contrast the most responsible, the most challenging, and, in the sense of being true to yourself, the most honorable thing to do is face up to the strength potential inherent in your talents and then find ways to realize it.

Relationships help us to define who we are and what we can become. Most of us can trace our successes to pivotal relationships.

Our definition of a weakness is anything that gets in the way of excellent performance.

At an early age, you started hearing it: It's a virtue to be "well-rounded." ... They might as well have said : Become as dull as you possibly can be.