100 Ways To Motivate Yourself, Third Edition

91. Exploit your weakness

Make a list of your strengths and your weaknesses on separate pieces of paper. Place the list of strengths somewhere where you’ll see it again, because it will always pick you up. Now look at your list of weaknesses and study them for a while. Stay with them until you feel no shame or guilt about them. Allow them to become interesting characteristics, instead of negative traits. Ask yourself how each characteristic could be useful to you. That’s not what we usually ask about our weaknesses, but that’s my whole point.

When I was a boy, I remember watching a remarkable tap dancer by the name of “Peg Leg Bates” on the Ed Sullivan show. Bates had lost his leg early in life, a circumstance that would lead most people to give ...