Business Success Tip: Know Your Business

During our previous blog posts, we spent some time focusing on gaining clarity in your business. To this end we posed several questions, the first of which was:

What business are you in?

The first and most important question is: “What business am I in?” What business are you really in? Define your business in terms of what you do for your customer or for your company. Keep expanding the definition of your business so that it is as broad as possible. Never be satisfied with the first answer.

For example, many years ago, some railroads defined themselves as being in the “railroad business.” In reality, they were in the business of transporting goods and people. By ignoring the other avenues of transportation that were developing, such as trucks, buses, ships and airplanes, many railroads went out of business.

You Are Extraordinary! – Identifying Your Special Talents and Abilities

In 1967, Dr. Thomas A. Harris, a practicing psychiatrist in California, wrote a groundbreaking book that was destined to become a best-seller. On its jacket cover, it is described as “a fresh, sensible, increasingly popular approach to the problems that every human being faces every day in his relations with himself and others. Transactional Analysis,” it explains, “is a new break-through, one that confronts the individual with the fact that he is (we all are) responsible for what happens in the future, no matter what has happened in the past.” The title of the book is,  I’M OK — — YOU’RE OK.

I cannot argue with Dr. Thomas’ essential premise. Anyone familiar with my work knows that the principle of self-responsibility lies at the core of my teachings. Yet I do argue with the title of his book (while recognising that it was designed as a catchy slogan, not a descriptor of the author’s beliefs). You are not merely OK. You are extraordinary!

This is another fundamental principle. As we stated in our first session, you have special talents and abilities that you can use to achieve all your goals in life. If you are serious about taking charge of your life, about achieving your goals, about making your life a work of art, you must discover what these special talents and abilities are, and then commit yourself to honing them into a fine, precision instrument.

There are five clues that will help you in this process of self-discovery. When you are engaged in an activity in which you are drawing on your special talents and abilities: