One of my Facebook fans hit me up last week and asked me a interesting question…
“What things are just not worth the effort?”
This is what I said to him:
Working on your weaknesses… I spend so much time trying to be good enough at ALL possible areas that I forget to focus on my natural strengths and ambitions…
Improving in an area of your “natural weakness” takes far too much time, compared to the benefits you get out of it…
I now go by the rule: “I don’t work on my weaknesses, UNLESS they hinder me from executing on my strengths.”
For example: if my weakness is laziness this stops me from following through on other areas of my life… so I try to work on this “weakness”… if on the other hand my weakness is drawing and I am a terrible artist, there is no need to polish this skill in order to be “average”…
But…
This leads to the question: “How do you decide which of your weaknesses to work on changing and which to accept?”
So what do I mean by “a weakness which hinders me from executing on my strengths”?
This type of weakness is everything that stops you on following through on your “strength tasks”.
- If you have troubles with laziness, you can’t become a pro athlete (even if you would consider this your strengths)
- If you have issues with procrastination, it’s hard for you to build the business or finish this big project of yours.
- If you have small self-worth and beat yourself up a lot, it’s hard to convince other people of your ideas and visions and dreams, and they might not join you…
It usually makes no sense to improve your natural disadvantages… getting from bad to average takes way too much time and you possible won’t make it till excellent or awesome in your life span…
(Not because you CAN’T do it, but furthermore because you won’t stick with it long enough because – let’s face it – working on your natural weaknesses sucks and you won’t have enough passion and endurance to put the 10000 hours of mastery…)
PS: I wrote an article once about why It’s Not Worth It To Work On Your Weaknesses. Maybe you’ll get some value out of these thoughts as well…
