14 Quotes by Donald O. Clifton

At an early age, you started hearing it: It's a virtue to be "well-rounded."... They might as well have said : Become as dull as you possibly can be.

Your weaknesses will never develop, while your strengths will develop infinitely.

What leaders have in common is that each really knows their strengths, has developed their strengths, and can call on the right strength at the right time.

Relationships help us to define who we are and what we can become. Most of us can trace our successes to pivotal relationships.

Our definition of a weakness is anything that gets in the way of excellent performance.

Each of these strategies-get a little better at it, design a support system, use one of your strongest themes to overwhelm your weakness, find a partner, and just stop doing it-can help you as you strive to build your life around your strengths.

If your senses are numbed with delusion and denial, you will stop looking for these true strengths and wind up living a second-rate version of someone’s life rather than a worldclass version of your own.

The point here is not that you should always forgo this kind of weakness fixing. The point is that you should see it for what it is: damage control, not development. And as we mentioned earlier, damage control can prevent failure, but it will never elevate you to excellence.

Our research into human strengths does not support the extreme, and extremely misleading, assertion that ‘you can play any role you set your mind to,’ but it does lead us to this truth: Whatever you set your mind to, you will be most successful when you craft your role to play to your signature talents most of the time.