Deciding if You Should Build Your Strengths or Fix Your Weaknesses
There are two rules of thumb I live by when it comes to deciding whether to build strengths or fix weaknesses while pursuing personal growth. The first rule is to spend as little time, energy, and emotion in areas of weakness as possible. The second rule is to not forget rule #1.
With this in mind, sometimes you just can’t avoid dealing with a weakness. As much as one would love to spend all of their time investing in their talents and building them into strengths, there is one situation in particular that forces you to work on a weakness.
By definition, a weakness is only a weakness when it’s something that gets in the way of your goals. For example, being bad at drawing cartoons is not a weakness if you don’t have a goal to draw cartoons. Instead, this is simply a non-talent. However, if for some reason drawing cartoons becomes important to your goals, then this non-talent transforms into a weakness.
If you find yourself in a situation like this, then you will have to address the reality of the weakness. But the goal should never be to “fix” a weakness, as that’s not the point. The point is to reach your goal. Therefore, if you apply the rule of thumb on pursuing personal growth, then you will seek to spend as little time, energy, and emotion as possible on addressing the weakness in pursuit of your goal.
This minimum amount of time is only applied to prevent the weakness from getting in the way of your goal. What’s more, even with this minimum time spent, it’s best used learning how to leverage your strengths better to eliminate your dependency on that weakness.