We all have strengths and weaknesses in our lives. But if your goal is to become more successful and generate better results personally, professionally or both your best route may be to stop worrying so much about your deficiencies and instead focus your efforts on building upon those areas where you already excel.

This idea flies in the face of the advice you might have heard for much of your life namely, work hard to overcome weaknesses and improve the parts of your life where you come up short. Think way back to grade school report cards, for example. Did your parents pay the most attention to the A’s you got or did they home in on any C’s or D’s?

The fact is, we live in a culture that constantly tells us to fix the weakest parts of our lives. That makes sense if you’re talking about a leaky roof but it might not be ideal if you want to achieve great things and make important contributions to the world around you.

Uncovering Excellence: To see why, consider findings from the global analytics firm Gallup: Companies that focus on developing their people’s strengths (instead of fixing their weaknesses) have higher employee engagement, better performance and lower attrition.

In our experience, highly successful people such as the ultra-wealthy, with $25 million or more of net worth seek to consistently strengthen their strengths. Put another way, these people are centered. And it’s a big reason why they enjoy their significant wealth.

Being centered means that you consider your areas of excellence as a lens through which you focus most of your efforts and energies.

While highly successful people typically have numerous skills and talents, only a very few of these skills and talents are instrumental in enabling them to achieve great success. And so they focus on those few areas. 

At the same time, creating and managing a very successful operation that can make you considerably wealthier will require that you source and work with other people and groups. Focusing on your strengths doesn’t mean you ignore your areas of weakness. It means you get others around you to manage and deal with those areas.

Not sure what your exceptional skills and talents are? Use the following process to help uncover your areas of excellence.

1. Experiment with Initiatives: People cannot know what they truly excel at unless they have tried a number of different things. Without experimentation, it’s impossible to determine where your true wealth-generating talents and skills lie.
   
   
2. Identify Your Contributions to Various Initiatives that proved Extraordinary: This is fairly easy. The only complication is that you need to be precise when it comes to your definition of success. For example, a business endeavor can come up short, but your contributions can still indicate which of your capabilities were exceptional. (At the same time, determine your contributions that were unremarkable or even poor.)
   
   
3. Repeat Steps 1 and 2 Until You Identify a Solid, Verifiable Pattern: As you continue to experiment and critically evaluate your contributions to various endeavors, you will probably start to see a pattern. Highly successful people often have to take many “swings at the ball” before they can consistently find the pattern that counts. By doing so, you will identify the areas where your abilities truly outshine others’.
   
   
4. Drill Down into the Areas You Excel In to Determine Your Outstanding Competencies: Take what you’ve learned about your skills and talents and dig deeper to determine your truly exceptional capabilities and talents. Be brutally honest with yourself here lying to yourself about a weakness will only hinder your progress. At this point, you will probably reach an important conclusion: While you may do a fair number of things very well, you possess (at best) just a handful of truly amazing abilities that can lead to significant wealth creation.
   
   
5. Stop Experimenting and Stay Centered: Even after people identify their most remarkable skills and talents, they often are tempted to deviate from them to pursue shiny new “opportunities.” Big mistake. Once you’ve discovered your astounding skills and talents, it’s absolutely vital to stay centered. It’s counterproductive when people who know where they excel choose to expend energy and time on areas where they add less value (often considerably less). Result: The likelihood of them reaching their milestones, let alone their financial end goals, diminishes tremendously.

Three Guidelines to Help You Get Centered: Being centered means focusing on skills and talents that are applicable in business and other wealth-generation situations. While highly successful people are all about being centered, we find that very few people are able to concentrate on what they do exceptionally well. It’s tough to get over the feeling that it’s necessary to deal with a plethora of matters we’re only marginally adept at handling.

The idea of being so highly focused contrasts with what executives at major corporations or many business owners, for example, are often told. In many larger companies, middle managers are advised to concentrate on improving in the areas where they’re weak.

The smarter move: Learn to delegate those tasks, and concentrate on the areas where you’re strongest and that are in the pathway of wealth creation.

By being centered, highly successful people maximize one of their most critical resources: time. Simultaneously, they act in ways that are most likely to translate into achieving their milestones and consequently their financial end goal.

The following guidelines can help you in becoming and staying centered.

Guideline 1: No one has unique skills and talents. When it comes to talents and abilities, every single extremely wealthy individual is also fungible. For that matter, so are you. Along the same lines, there is not a single thing you can do that’s truly unique. Other people can do the same things you can, and there are no doubt people out there who can do these things just as well or better. Truly successful people don’t try to focus on unique abilities. Instead, they home in on what they do exceptionally well and apply those skills and talents in prosperous business scenarios. 

Wealth Creation Implication: As you go through the process, you’re not looking for absolutely unique capabilities. What you need to unearth are those skills and talents that fit two criteria. One is that they’re areas where you seriously excel. The other is that they are applicable in situations that will make you very wealthy.

Guideline 2: Be hard-hitting in your self-evaluations. You need to be very critical when you evaluate strengths to tell the difference between where you’re merely very good and where you’re exceptional. The most successful people we know have put themselves “through the wringer” to define their best wealth-generating abilities. Most had to find these answers through a litany of experiences, some of them painful. 

Wealth Creation Implication: As you evaluate your contributions to various business initiatives, you need to be very tough on yourself for your own good. To accurately determine those areas where you excel, you can’t afford not to bruise your own ego. 

Guideline 3: There are few legitimate Renaissance men and women. If you asked a roomful of highly successful people what they brought to their various endeavors that made them fabulously wealthy, you’d likely hear the same skills and talents repeated over and over again. Highly successful people can’t do it all, and they know it. Instead, they concentrate on where they can add the greatest value. 

Wealth Creation Implication: If you go through this process and come up with more than five areas where you excel, go back to the drawing board. Pare down your list to a maximum of five exceptional skills and talents (three would be even better).  

Conclusion: We all have only 168 hours each week to make our dent in the universe. Don’t waste that time trying to get better in areas where you don’t excel. Instead, stay centered on your top skills and talents. Maintaining a laserlike focus on what you do best that generates great results is a way to accelerate your success and have the impact you desire in business and in life.

DISCLOSURE: Robert W. Baird & Co. Incorporated is not a legal or tax services provider and you are strongly encouraged to seek the advice of the appropriate professional advisors before taking any action. Baird No.: 8753345.1. ACKNOWLEDGEMENT: VFO Inner Circle Special Report, By John J. Bowen Jr.© Copyright 2026 by AES Nation, LLC. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or retransmitted in any form or by any means, including but not limited to electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or any information storage retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Unauthorized copying may subject violators to criminal penalties as well as liabilities for substantial monetary damages up to $100,000 per infringement, costs and attorneys’ fees. This publication should not be utilized as a substitute for professional advice in specific situations. If legal, medical, accounting, financial, consulting, coaching or other professional advice is required, the services of the appropriate professional should be sought. Neither the author nor the publisher may be held liable in any way for any interpretation or use of the information in this publication. The author will make recommendations for solutions for you to explore that are not his own. Any recommendation is always based on the author’s research and experience. The information contained herein is accurate to the best of the publisher’s and author’s knowledge; however, the publisher and author can accept no responsibility for the accuracy or completeness of such information or for loss or damage caused by any use thereof.