Building on strengths vs. fixing our weaknesses
When you’re a kid, you think you can be an astronaut and play in the NBA. Are you willing to settle for just one of those? (NASA photo)
Is Kendrick Lamar handy with a hammer?
How’s Saoirse Ronan’s volleyball serve?
Sure, David McCullough is a revered writer, but can he write funny tweets?
We really don’t care. These greats are valued for their contributions to our culture — we don’t need them to be good at everything.
Even though we can readily recognize that we don’t need the very best artists, athletes, and activists to be well-rounded, many of us still think that we need to be well-rounded.
Perhaps it stems from childhood, in which we’re placed in a cohort of a hundred other kids our age and required to do everything together, from math to reading to playground sports. And get rated and ranked on our performance.
Maybe our parents told us we had to be the best at everything. And maybe if we got a bunch of As and one C, they focused on the C.
You can’t get higher than an A, so there was no point in investing more heavily in that area. But the places where you aren’t 100 percent required more effort and attention.
Thus, we learn to address our weaknesses and take our strengths for granted. However, once you’re out of school, great success comes from doing the exact opposite.
In reality, there is no ceiling when it comes to the development of our strengths. Rafa Nadal is never going to say, “Well, I’m good enough at tennis now; I should focus on biochemistry.” No, there’s no slowing him down or distracting him from his best work. And his best work takes a huge amount of effort and time.
Meanwhile, trying to fix our weaknesses doesn’t really get us anywhere. Will Ferrell, famous funny guy, worked as a very bad bank teller before finding success as a comedian. If he had focused on improving his precision and trying to move up in the financial industry, not only would he likely be facing decades of frustration, he’d be tamping down the wildness and eccentricity that made him famous.
If we want to achieve something meaningful — or even just have more fun in life — we are much better off building on our strengths than attempting to shore up our weaknesses. By far, our biggest “bang for the buck” is found when we earnestly pursue one thing until we get good at it, and then keep going.
When we see others who can do cool things we can’t do, it’s easy to compare ourselves and feel inferior. It’s tempting to get distracted from doing our best work and add something else to our list. That’s fine if we’re enjoying ourselves, but we need not feel discouraged just because we aren’t as good as someone else at a particular thing. Regardless of what you may have been told as a child, you don’t have to be the best at everything. And you actually can’t.
When we let go of the compulsion to be equally good at everything, we give ourselves space to become truly excellent at something, whether that’s being a mechanic, a magician, or a mother. And when we can appreciate our own strengths, we can appreciate the strengths of others without feeling threatened by them.
Life is too short to do everything — and it’s too short to feel bad about that.