Lesson 6: Find Out What You’re Great At

As part of the Commit or Kill campaign for Book Rapper, here’s Book Rapper Lesson #6.

My Gift

What’s the best way to find out what you’re great at? When I started Book Rapper, I didn’t know that I had a gift for sifting through information and pulling out the big ideas. I just read lots of books and did this automatically.

Finding Your Gift

How would you find out what your gift is? I think this is the wrong question to be asking. I think a more useful question goes back to our first Book Rapper lesson: What do you love doing? It’s in the doing of things that we find out who we are.

What Do People Admire About You?

Or, a more specific question: What do you already do that people admire?

For as long as most people have known me, I’ve had little notebooks filled with sketches and diagrams. And, for the same period of time, I’ve had people saying they loved my drawings, mind maps, doodles and models. I’m a visual spatial thinker. I work best when I’m drawing and mapping. No surprise I trained as an architect!

And, this is the seed for Book Rapper! This is what I’ve always done and what people have always admired.

Admiration and Business

There’s a good chance if people admire you doing something then you can package that into a business proposition. You just need to find the right audience and the right business model. Just like me right now… What’s the right audience and business model for Book Rapper?

Don’t Do This, Consider This

The best way to NOT find out what you’re great at is to sit down and try to work it out. This’ll probably send you down a deep dark tunnel. Avoid this.

You could find it out in one of those psychological profiling tools. One I have used that was valuable is Roger Hamilton’s Wealth Dynamics. I’m currently revisiting this as a means to focussing on what I do best. In Roger’s model, I’m a creator/mechanic. This means I create things and I tinker with them. The people who know me will be nodding their heads right now.

The Lesson

I think the best way to find out what your gift: Get into action doing what you do. Notice what you love to do. And, notice what people admire about what you do. And, in the overlap of these two things you’ll find your gift and potential business idea.