Sunday Reflection: Finding your unique value proposition and path to thrive
Hey, this is James, and welcome to a 🔒 subscriber-only edition 🔒 of my weekly newsletter. In this article, I share a Sunday reflection for your week ahead that influences the quality of your life: where do you focus your finite time and energy to do work you love that you are uniquely qualified for?
Throughout my professional life, I have thought a lot about where I spend time and whether it’s truly where I can bring out my best to do work I love. It’s a never-ending question as we travel throughout our careers. We all have expectations of what we want to achieve and who we want to become. I find that most people rarely pause to explore where they are and where they want to go. This post will leave you with a few questions to help you explore how your current path and job meet your expectations.
Ambitious people who seek to excel at their craft, earn compensation above the norm, and stand out, strategically position themselves to solve valuable problems by doing great work that taps into their best selves. The visual model below encapsulates this core idea from Strategy 2 - Target a Unique Opportunity in the Career Strategy Framework.
The thesis is to target a path and a job that considers four dimensions:
Best Self - tapping into your inner self to align your work with your values, vision, purpose, and who you want to become
Valuable problem - allocating time and unique skills to problems that are valuable to solve and are likely to exist in the future
Unique solutions - leveraging your consciousness and competence to develop and innovate unique solutions to valuable problems
Energy - loving the work you do and work returning that energy
There is no single best job in the center, but many jobs, each with their tradeoffs. The key is to consider these four dimensions as you evaluate where you are and what may need to change to step closer to experiencing your true potential.
Reflection Questions
Explore and meditate on 2-3 questions from my writing or two books that challenge you to focus on uniqueness.
From the Career Strategy Framework using the visual above:
How is my current path/job aligned with the qualities of my best self, such as values, vision, purpose, and who I want to become?
How am I differentiated from other people in similar jobs? What makes my value proposition unique and defensible?
What problems can I work on that are valuable right now and will continue to be in the near future?
Using the vision of your best self, what work would I love to do that brings infinite energy?
From the book Burn the Boats by Matt Higgins (highly recommended!):
What am I uniquely positioned to do that no one else can?
What insights do I see that no one is acting on?
What makes me special, and how can I leverage that to the greatest extent possible?
What, in my heart of hearts, do I really want to do?
From the book The Big Leap: Conquer Your Hidden Fear and Take Life to the Next Level by Gay Hendricks:
Operating in the Zone of Genius will set you free.
What do I most love to do? (I love it so much I can do it for long stretches of time without getting tired or bored)
What work do I do that doesn’t seem like work? (I can do it all day without ever feeling tired or bored.)
In my work, what produces the highest ratio of abundance and satisfaction to amount of time spent? (Even if I do only ten seconds or a few minutes of it, an idea or a deeper connection may spring forth that leads to huge value.)
What is my unique ability? (There’s a special skill I’m gifted with. This unique ability, fully realized and put to work, can provide enormous benefits to me and any organization I serve.)
Life is short. Consider what you are giving up by not pursuing and magnifying your unique value proposition.
Have a great week, and I look forward to hearing your feedback!
- James