What Are You Best At?

I am a communication person. I love looking at communication in every field - political, social, business - it doesn't matter. Whenever someone is speaking I am analyzing things and evaluating them to see what they could do to get better (don't worry, I don't do this when I am in a conversation with you, just when you're giving a public speech). I do this even when I'm not being paid to, its just ingrained in me. At the same time, I am not a graphic designer. I have done a lot of reading and studying when it comes to good design and have improved a great deal over the past couple of years. I am good at creating clean effective presentations, but I am still not a graphic designer.

I realized this over the weekend while working with some graphic designers on a new pamphlet for Dahle Communication Group. When working on the pamphlet, I had worked on the design of it, and it looked pretty good. I was quite proud of myself and it would have looked nice. Then two fantastic graphic design artists re-designed it and just crushed me with their design. It is nothing short of fantastic! Would mine have worked? Sure it would have. I would have been happy with it and a few people who helped edit it thought it looked pretty good. But it has nothing on the new version.

This made me realize something: do what you do best and have other people help you who do what they do best. I am great at helping people become better speakers and presenters. I am great at helping create an effective speech, developing a theme and finding those three key topics people should cover during a speech. But if I need some help with design, I know who I need to go to.

Remember this in whatever industry you are in or business that you own. Find something that you do well and become great at that. Trying to be okay at several things usually doesn't wow anyone. However, being great at what you do is something that you can promote and be highly successful at. Don't get me wrong, I am still going to work on improving at design. I don't want to just focus on communication and become inept at everything else. But if I need something done to wow people, I know who it needs to go to.

Travis