Strengths

Two pieces of advice that each sound good but which also seem in conflict with each other:

  1. Focus on your strengths and delegate where you’re weak. This provides leverage: You get much more and better work done when you spend most of your time on what you’re good at doing. The stuff you’re not so good at can be done by someone else who’s better and faster at that stuff.

  2. Don’t lean too heavily on your strengths. If you do, you’ll become addicted to them and it’ll blind you to the benefits of strengthening yourself in other areas. When you throw out all your tools except for the hammer, the habit arises of looking at every problem like a nail. Think of the ace developer who wants to turn every problem into a technical problem: Sometimes, that problem could be solved more effectively and efficiently with a conversation.

So: Focus on your strengths for leverage. Don’t focus on your strengths, so you don’t stagnate. Can both of these things be true?

What if we rephrase? “Focus on your strengths for leverage; but not too much, so you don’t stagnate.”