Would you rather…
Would you rather improve your performance (at work, while exercising, as a parent, or as a friend) by hammering your weakness or increasing your strength?
There might be some easy “beginner gains” to be made by hammering your weakness. You might improve your knowledge, skill, or your strength by simply starting to work on it. For an absolute beginner, any practice moves the needle in the right direction. You don’t need the best plan, the best coach, or the most advanced tools; you need to start.
But after those early days of easy improvement... Hammering your weakness requires a lot more grit and persistence. Chances are, your weakness is something you don’t intrinsically like to work on/with. Chances are, your weakness does not come naturally to you and hence requires severe amounts of deliberate work over a longer timeframe.
Improving that weakness will require consistent work—little bits of deliberate practice over the long haul to increase your chances of success. I aim for 25 minutes daily and frame it as an exercise to train my grit. Can I do this hard thing? I might not want to do this right now, but I will do it anyway. Can I be at my best while I might feel at my worst? Can I reward myself afterward to make the hard work worthwhile? How does doing this one hard thing help my ability to do other hard things in my life? The reward of hammering my weakness only comes after consistent hard work.
Working on improving your strengths, on the other hand, is rewarding in itself. You do the things you like to do in the way you like to do them, and the almost effortless performance leads to you being rewarded with sensations of being proud and fulfilled. It would be best to have a moving target, an ever-increasingly tricky goal, to maintain challenged to improve your strengths. If not, you’ll quickly get bored.
But what exactly are your strengths? If you were to list your strengths, would the people close to you name similar things as your strengths?
In what domains are you currently using your strengths? Can you use them in other domains? Are there creative ways to use your strengths to solve issues or improve weaknesses?
This is where the real magic lies and your strengths can help you in ways you didn’t think possible.
