The Strengths Mindset vs. The Weakness Mindset
There are two basic mindsets you can use to approach personal growth. You can either focus on building your strengths or focus on fixing your weaknesses.
When you have a strengths mindset you focus your personal growth journey on making your strengths stronger. Or to put it differently, you find ways to become great in the areas in which you are good.
On the other hand, when you have a weakness mindset you focus your personal growth journey on fixing your weaknesses. The goal is to constantly work on areas in which you perform bad and find a way to improve.
While there isn’t necessarily anything wrong with either of these mindsets, I generally don’t recommend the weakness mindset. For one, our society is moving away from rewarding generalist or Jack and Jill of all trade types. When you spend your time fixing a weakness, at best you go from bad to average. Even after investing a significant amount of time, average is normally the best outcome when fixing weaknesses. What’s more, it’s very unlikely to go from bad to great in an area of weakness. At least not without sacrificing one or more of your strengths in the process.
To maximize your potential, the best path is typically in developing expertise in an area of strength. With so much data available in hiring, choosing contractors, as well as picking products and services, no one is seeking the 20th best option. It’s a fact that most people never go past the first page of Google’s search results. So, if you aren’t one of the 10 best options then you aren’t an option. As a result, investing the time to strengthen your strengths is almost always worth it. Especially if that investment bumps you into one of the best 10 people in an area of interest.
With that being said, the mindset approach I recommend is to default towards building your strengths, but don’t ignore your weaknesses. This means when all things are equal, invest most of your time in your strengths and only work on your weaknesses just enough to keep them from stopping you from reaching your goals.