In business and in life, we’re taught the importance of working hard to eliminate weakness.

Looking back to high school this principal certainly held true for me.

My short comings were always in math. As a result, I spent considerable after-school time in Mr. Chandler’s classroom straining to pinpoint the area of an acute triangle and memorizing vital quadratic equations.

The concept makes sense. By hustling to eliminate points of weakness, we become well-rounded individuals and learn the value of hard work to overcome challenges in the process.

But there’s a flaw in this guideline which becomes apparent when you commit too much time and effort to developing weak skill sets in hope of becoming average at best, when you could be refining the talents that make you truly exceptional.

Reflecting on my high school math class example, I eventually passed, but there was no chance I’d ever become the next Grigory Perelman. (I just Googled “math genius.” Grigory Perelman is the first name that came up.)

Find Your Strength.

This is the core concept behind the book Strengths Finder 2.0 by Tom Rath. Instead of concentrating our efforts on areas of weakness, areas where we will never be exceptional, building on and identifying your natural strengths is a better alternative.

Because within these pockets of natural strength are the areas you’ll have the best chance of becoming truly exceptional.

This concept holds true for SEO business ownership as well: By leveraging your own strengths and teaming up others who are strong in other areas.

A simple way I put this concept into action is by outsourcing any technical and design work. I’m not too much of a coder and it would take me way too much time to learn. Even if I did learn, I’d never be as good as someone I outsourced the work to.

In this situation, it makes sense to leverage another persons skill sets, instead of focusing on my own weakness.

As you likely suspected, identifying your natural abilities or talents is what Strength Finder 2.0 is all about.

Strength Finder 2.0 is short book. The value lies in taking a 30-minute rapid fire quiz online in which each question must be answered within 20 seconds. Rath limits the time you can answer each quiz question in order to get your “gut” response.

After completing the skill test on www.strengthsfinder.com, the website creates a list of your top 5 talents based how you answered the quiz along with some action items on leveraging existing talents.

I’m not going to get into the specifics of the research behind Strength Finder 2.0 in this article, but you you can find out more about the science of it here. Also, here’s a free strength based development pdf put out by Gallop if you want to start identifying your strengths now.

This won’t mean much if you haven’t read the book, but here are my top 5 talents according to Strength Finder 2.0:

So if you’re ready to stop fighting nature and start focusing on the talents that make you truly exceptional (like me), you can pick up the book pretty cheap at Amazon. There might even be a few ways to check it out for free online, not sure.

And if you’ve read Strengths Finder 2.0 by Tom Rath already, share your talent set in the comments below. I’d love to see the results others got from it.