Happy Monday!

Welcome back to the work week - after the long weekend. But as always, the weekend is always too short (even after a long weekend).

The work week was short for me - filled with IRL meetings. Work lunches, dinner, networking session and finally ended the week with Retail Executive Summit at MBS. I literally stood the entire day, apart from my 10-min lunch break. (For context, Shopify, where I work, is 100% WFH. We have no offices in Singapore and globally.)

I was drained at the end of the week - but the IRL networking and being at the Summit cemented one fact - IRL is my thing. I enjoy meeting, connecting with and connecting folks in real life (in a business context). It gives me energy and I seem to do it so naturally and effortlessly a lot more than others. It’s my zone of genius.

What's one thing you do that's uniquely good in the world, that you love and time and space seem to disappear when you do it? What’s your zone of genius?

Best,

John Lim

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What’s your zone of genius / What gives you energy

From one of the most enlightening podcast episodes I heard in 2022:

The concept is you have four zones.

1. Zone one is your incompetence, you're not good at it, someone's better at it than you. That's like fixing a car. You should let someone else do that.

2. Second is your zone of competence, you're fine, you can do it fine. But so can somebody else do it fine. Like cleaning your house. Yes, you could do it, but it would take a lot of time and you're not creating that much value. You should let someone else do that.

3. Third zone, your zone of excellence. This is something that you're uniquely good at, but you don't love it. This is the danger zone. This is likely what you're getting paid for and you're likely to getting paid a lot of money for it. Other people want you to do it. You are creating value, but it's also sucking the life force out of you and it doesn't allow you to become amazing and create massive value.

4. Then there's your zone of genius. This is the thing you do that's uniquely good in the world and you don't even notice that you're doing it because you love it so much. The key is to go and look at your day. How do you move into the zone of genius? It's not that you figure out what it is and do more of that, it's that you figure out what it isn't and eliminate that and then naturally, you'll be drawn toward what it is that you love.

The podcast episode goes on to talk about how you can do this energy audit by going through your calendar and what to do with result of this audit. If you’re interested, check out the episode transcript or youtube video below (from time stamp 01:01:48 onwards). I highly recommend watching/listening to the entire episode.

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DISCLAIMER: Opinions expressed in newsletter and podcast are solely my own and do not represent the opinions of past, current or future organizations that I was, am and will be part of.