If your strengths are those activities that strengthen you, your weaknesses are the opposite. The more effective you are at identifying the things that weaken you and cutting them out of your life as efficiently as possible, the more successful you will be.

Objectors to this strategy point out that life doesn't work this way. They ask whatever happened to paying your dues, or stretching yourself with some new and difficult assignments, or balancing your life with some things you like and some you don't.

To answer, let me refer to brain research. In the last decade, more and more evidence is emerging that what you can learn and what you can't is at least 50 per cent determined by what genes you have. This doesn't mean that experience has no part to play in learning. On the contrary, experience or "nurture" plays a significant role. But it does mean that how and what you learn from experience is determined by your genes. For example, no matter how much experience you are given, you will never learn to smell as effectively as a rat. Why? Because a rat has 1,036 different olfactory receptor genes, whereas you have only 347.

Your genetic makeup explains why there is a limit to what you can learn and why some things are easy for you to learn, while others are excruciatingly difficult (you always excel at remembering people's names because you have the genes for it but you always struggle with analyzing data because you don't - or vice versa).

Also, while you will continue to learn throughout adulthood, you will learn most in those areas where you already know the most, where the synaptic branches in your brain are already thick and strong from the things you focused on most during childhood, when learning is easiest.

Start your career by taking stock of your strengths and orienting your career choices around them. Yes, as you experience some measure of success, feel free to experiment, to try new roles and responsibilities and see how they fit. However, keep your senses alert to those aspects of your role that bore you, or frustrate you, or drain you.

Keep this in mind: You will not feel most energized and challenged when focusing on your flaws. Whenever you become aware of some aspect you dislike, do not try to work through it. Do not chalk it up to the realities of life. Do not put up with it. Instead, cut it out of your life as fast as you can. Eradicate it.

Once you're in the game, "discover what you don't like doing and stop doing it" specifies the discipline you will need to reach all-star levels of performance, to sustain those levels, and to win, consistently. Click on Four Basic Blocks for help in identifying the causes of your dislikes - this will help you determine what you need to do to eradicate it. It will never be easy, but at least you will be able to act with more precision.

Basically: quit the role, tweak the role, seek out the right partner, or find an aspect of the role that brings you strength: these four tactics will prove the most effective as you try to remove the things you are tolerating. You may not find it easy - and there may be stretches in your career where you deliberately deviate from your strengths' path in the hope that the diversion will lead to better things further on. However, never lose sight of this essential principle: the longer you put up with aspects of you work you don't like, the less successful you will be. So far as you are able, and as quickly as you can, stop doing them and then see what the best of you, now focused and unfettered, can achieve.