Superpower Development is Not for the Faint of Heart
Editor’s Note: This is a guest post from Karl Staib of Work Happy Now.
If you want to do great work, you must be able to leverage your superpowers. I’m not talking about throwing on a cape and stopping a car from crashing into an orphanage. I’m talking about saving lives with your career.
Too many of us label our superpowers as strengths, skills, and talents. We put these boring labels on our abilities because we don’t want to put too much faith in them.
We don’t want to unleash our superpowers because we are afraid that people might laugh at us. We downplay our skills so we don’t get burned by them. As a result, we refuse to explore our personal growth.
Ze Frank optimized his flexible mind to create interactive media. From Dancing puppets to What to do if you are bored in the office to How to dance properly, he uses his creative superpowers to make people laugh, think, and share with each other. If that’s not saving lives then I don’t know what is.
Let’s break down what exactly it means to develop your superpowers.
Your superpowers depend on 3 questions:
How passionate are you?
Can you stay focused on this activity?
Are you using your strengths?
Before you can do great work, you must ask yourself these questions before you start any project:
How Passionate Are You?
If you aren’t intrinsically motivated by the project then there is no way to manufacture passion. I can’t emphasize this enough. You must feel a connection with your work or you won’t want to dive into the details.
I had a friend who loved to write. He wrote poetry for hours on end, but when he dabbled in writing a novel the passion just wasn’t there.
Can You Stay Focused On This Activity?
I love drawing, but it’s not a superpower of mine because I can’t seem to stay focused on it. I love the concepts, but not the execution.
You have to be able to stay focused on an important task for extended periods of time, otherwise you will accomplish nothing.
Every great blogger has put in a lot of time to developing great content. The more value they offer, the more people talk about their stuff.
Are You Using Your Strengths?
You are great at certain things, and these are the strengths that you should be using every day. Not just every other day, but every day.
You can choose to build your strengths or allow them to come naturally, but at some point you have to be great at this thing in order to consider your action a superpower
All Together Now
You must have passion, focus, and use your strengths when trying to accomplish great work. Take any element away and you have average results.
Remember that last project that you were passionate about? The one that you loved working on. How did that work out? I bet it turned out pretty good.
When you enjoy the actions within a project the outcomes are always awesome.
Heart
Your heart must be all in or your energy is going to drop off. Think about your favorite musical artist. They had amazing talent, but that’s not what got them to the top. They listened when their muse talked. They practiced in their basement when everyone was laughing at them. They played in smelly bars when no one was listening.
They refused to let their dream die.
You have superpowers that you must refuse to let die. You are reading this for a reason. You know you can use your superpowers to level up your business/career. You just have to use them every day.
The best way to discover what your superpowers are is to ask yourself what people usually ask you to do for them? Why do they need your help?
If people don’t come to you for help with anything then that probably means you need to start engaging in more of your passions.
I wouldn’t ask my wife to help me fix our car because I know that, her heart wouldn’t be in it. I do ask her to help me edit my blog posts and ebooks because that’s where her superpowers lie.
Your Turn
Now it’s your turn and you have to be brutally honest. Are you doing work that plays to your passions strengths, and focus?
If not, then you probably find it much harder to be productive. I takes a lot of willpower. Eventually, you probably just end up bullying yourself into doing work that sucks and that is going to drain you.
You have to find a way to use your superpowers every single day. I’m not going to pretend that this is easy. It’s not. However, you have to find a way to do it because your results depend on it.
Ze Frank has had many failures, each one creative, but not always interesting. Click around his site and you’ll see some dumb stuff. However, you will also see some amazing concepts. These are the concepts that we share with each other. Ze Frank, your favorite blogger, and your favorite musician, found that sweet spot and so can you.
It takes a lot of trial and error to figure out your superpowers and start doing amazing work, but in the end you’ll have better results.
What is your superpower that you are sharing with the world? How are you using it to improve people’s lives?