Summary: Your happiness is up to you. It’s up to you to increase your awareness and use your strengths to develop happiness and fulfillment in life.<br> When you identify your unique strong points, you’ll be able to bounce back from adversity a lot quicker than others. Furthermore, it will give you a good starting point for developing strategies that will keep you “in the flow” so that you can effectively sidestep obstacles, maximize outcomes and savor life’s amazing treasures.<br> This is the ninth part of the Small Business Owners series, which I have started recently.<br> In the previous months, I covered the topics of <a href="http://www.strengthinbusiness.com/small-business-owners-social-media/">Social Media</a>, <a href="http://www.strengthinbusiness.com/small-business-owners-facebook-advertising/">Facebook Advertising</a>, <a href="https://twitter.com/kriszrokk" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Twitter</a>, <a href="http://www.strengthinbusiness.com/small-business-owners-email-marketing/">Email Marketing</a>, <a href="http://www.strengthinbusiness.com/small-business-owners-podcasting/">Podcasting</a>, <a href="http://www.strengthinbusiness.com/small-business-owners-marketing-funnels/">Marketing Funnels</a>, <a href="http://www.strengthinbusiness.com/small-business-owners-amazon-kindle/">Amazon Kindle </a>and <a href="http://www.strengthinbusiness.com/small-business-owners-live-events/">Live Events</a>.<br> Today, I’d like to highlight the importance of playing to your strengths in business. It has nothing to do with over-analyzing your weaknesses and wasting all your precious time and energy on improving upon these or turning them into opportunities.<br> I’m suggesting the exact opposite. Identify your unique strengths and double down on them. Don’t waste a second on your weaknesses. Know them and outsource them as quickly as possible.<br> The Misleading Passions vs. Strengths Idiom<br> Here comes possibly one of the biggest misconceptions in business and entrepreneurship: “Do what you’re passionate about and you’ll succeed.”<br> Is that really so?<br> Yes, passion is very important. It’s what drives you in life. It’s the fuel that makes you overcome some of the biggest hurdles in life.<br> Passion keeps your lights burning at night when preparing for your next move while improving upon your ideas, strategies and tactics. It is passion that makes you continue your fight when everybody else around you has lost faith in you and what it is that you’re trying to accomplish.<br> But passion alone will not make you successful in business. This ingredient is essential, however, it’s not a must when it comes to building a thriving business.<br> On the other hand, identifying your core strengths and leveraging them is a MUST if you want to create a solid business that will be around for many years to come.<br> Here’s an example to let the concept of strengths vs. passion really sink in:<br> I’m very passionate about medicine and everything that has to do with neuroscience, bio- and nanotechnology, quantum medicine and modern surgeries. I’m knowledgeable about these topics, I work with <a href="http://www.strengthinbusiness.com/marketing-mistakes-medical-professionals/">medical doctors</a> with all kinds of specialties, I attend conferences and workshops, I read about the latest discoveries and yet, despite of all of the above, my core strength doesn’t rely in the medical field.<br> My biggest strengths are in sales and marketing; that is in certain aspects of the sales process and in highly sophisticated marketing areas to be more precise. Therefore, instead of building my business around my passion, which is medicine, I doubled down on my strengths in business and chose the path of a strategic marketing advisor.<br> To take the entire concept to the next level, I embedded my passion into my business by providing services to medical doctors among other professions.<br> You see,
