Tuesday, May 25, 2010

Stay Thirsty

This sums up what I was blathering on about with that whole "forget your weaknesses thing."

Paint the Town

YES!

Love Your Strengths...

... forget your weaknesses.

This topic has popped up in my daily life in a variety of ways. Strengths, gifts, intelligences, currency, etc.

The idea of varied strengths was just on my mind last week for some reason and of course, Seth Godin read my mind (as he always does) and wrote about the idea of multiple intelligences... or "dumbnesses" as he calls it.

On Sunday, being Catholic and all, we celebrated Pentecost. Part of the focus is on our gifts as individuals and the importance of learning about these personal gifts, accepting them and making good use of them.

Today at work, each person in our office was given the book Living Your Strengths by Winseman, Clifton, and Liesveld. I took the (slightly frustrating) online test to discover my strengths: Futuristic, Ideation, Strategic, Maximizer, and Relator. I found it to be a very accurate analysis of my personality and natural abilities. (I may write more about this later)

THEN I see this article at Inc.com all about discovering your "currency."

Are you on this train?

It seems that in this world today, you have to know who you are and why anybody should listen to what you have to say. I also think that it is important to listen to others because 1) they probably have a lot of insight into the type of person you are and 2) if you want respect you've got to give it.

All of those places where this theme showed up this week? They all mention the importance of recognizing the strengths of others. This creates synergy... and it makes things more interesting.

Tuesday, May 18, 2010

Cheese, it's good

On Sunday, I hit up the Pike Place Cheese Festival for the second year in a row. I'm not sure if it's the cheese, the sun, the wine (or the friendly people drinking wine) or maybe a combination, but what a great event! It turned into quite the full day, ending with a concert at Neumo's.

Along the way we stopped by the brand new Seattle Hard Rock Cafe. Now, I would never actually go there for dinner but I heard they had a nice roof top bar (very uncommon in Seattle) so we had to check it out. It was super loungy - all couches and fire pits. The fire was very hot so eventually we had to move away and stand near the wall. I wasn't complaining though (except for the part where I did complain to the bartender... in a friendly way of course), the view is lovely up there! The bartender was friendly and so were all of the people hanging out. If you're ready to pay $6 for a beer and listen to the top 40 hits of the 90's, then I recommend it.

We made it to Neumo's for Frightened Rabbit with openers Maps & Atlases. Both very good bands. And I highly approve of their choice to play Fleetwood Mac between shows.

It really has been a while since I've been "out on the town" so it was a fun excursion. I'm more than ready for summer to come along so there can be more adventures.

Wednesday, May 12, 2010

Rethink Possibility

There's just something about this commercial... it really does make me want to be 5 years old again.