Ep 29: Should You Focus on Strengths or Weaknesses?

When designing your life, you can choose to lean into your superpowers and do more of the things that you’re really good at or you can choose to address your weak spots and focus on building up those things that you’re not naturally good at. You’ll hear people arguing both sides of this coin. Let’s explore what makes the most sense and how this fits into our work in creating our ideal selves.

Key Takeaways:

Conquering the things we struggle with can be very rewarding but not everything is worth the time and effort.

Sometimes it makes sense to outsource things that we don’t get value or fulfillment from doing ourselves.

Give yourself permission to not excel at everything! There’s nothing wrong with you just because other people can do certain things better than you.

Focusing on our strengths can allow us to achieve more (in a limited arena) than we can if we’re trying to be good at everything.

Lab Experiment (Download a copy)

Step 1: Identify an area of weakness…where you feel like you lack skill, talent, or affinity

Step 2: Consider how/whether strengthening this weakness could move you closer to your goals or your ideal self. What’s the minimum level of competence/comfort/mastery you would need to achieve and what would it take to achieve that?

Step 3: Consider the costs of addressing the weakness (opportunity costs of time not spent in strengths?) What (if anything) could you put into place to compensate for your lack of ability in this area.

Step 4: Make a conscious decision whether to address this weakness or allow it.