Why self-awareness is everything

"Ideas are worthless without execution. Execution is pointless without the ideas."

—Gary Vaynerchuck from "#AskGaryVee: One Entrepreneur's Take on Leadership, Social Media, and Self-Awareness"

There aren't too many people in the world who are really great at both ideas and execution. There are some, but there aren't many.

If you are reading this right now, there is a very good chance you are great at one of these and only good at the other. Or great at one and average at the other.

This is why partnering with the right person (or people) is so imperative for anyone looking to be an entrepreneur. Find someone who compliments your strengths and weaknesses well and move forward with them. (That's why I partnered with this knucklehead to form Pedal Note Media.)

If you don't want to partner with anyone, outsource whatever it is you aren't great at. Even if you had the time to get great at everything (and if you're a human, you don't), I argue you shouldn't be wasting your time learning how to do these other things at the expense of spending more time doing the work you think will change the world.

And the key to all of this is self-awareness. If you are brutally honest with yourself about what you can and can't do, it informs who you partner with and even what you attempt to bring to the world in the first place.

Self-awareness informs the ideas and the execution. So the question is what can you do today to get a little more honest with yourself?