Try anything well beyond your own strengths and you’re likely to fail. Aim short of your abilities and your talents will be unused, your work less than satisfactory. Examine yourself, therefore. Try to find how you work best. Evaluate your strengths and your weaknesses objectively. You may wonder why. Suppose you were head of a firm or organization. Would you hire a person like yourself? How much salary would you want to pay? What kind of work would you assign to such a person? It’s interesting to think about and you might realize what you ought to be doing, and how you can best perform your job.

By Konosuke Matsushita, founder of Panasonic