"Since childhood, we've all been sold a story about what it means to grow as a person. Confront your weaknesses! Identify your inadequacies! Find what's broken! And then get to work fixing yourself. Performance reviews zoom in on "areas for development" while self-help books urge us to leave our comfort zones and to seek out what is difficult. The message is clear: Your deficits define you and you should follow a path in life that is devoted to minimizing them."
"Overcoming weaknesses is a path to expanding our capabilities and evening out our opportunities. If you're terrible at public speaking, shouldn't you work on that? If you're disorganized, shouldn't you build better systems? Yes-but only to a certain point. In some cases, we do need a baseline competency in critical areas; in others, we may even need mastery at things that don't come naturally."
Cultural messages emphasize confronting weaknesses, identifying inadequacies, and leaving comfort zones, so people focus on minimizing deficits. Overcoming weaknesses can expand capabilities and equalize opportunities, and some roles require achieving mastery in areas that do not come naturally. However, constantly prioritizing weaknesses risks making one passably competent at many skills without becoming exceptional at any. Ease often signals genuine strengths, and concentrating effort on strengths allows development of deep expertise. Seek hard work and discomfort in ways aligned with strengths, and maintain baseline competence in critical areas while allocating most energy toward natural talents.
Read at Psychology Today
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