Your Strengths Are Not What You’re Good At
Since you were very young, you have been told that “your strengths are what you’re good at and your weaknesses are what you’re bad at.”
Seems eminently sensible, doesn’t it. If you get good grades in a subject, or if you perform really well at a certain sport or instrument, then this is a strength. It’s something that might set you apart from others, that might guide you as you think about what to study in college, or what career to choose.
But what happens if you’re really good at something that you hate? Or that bores you, or frustrates you, or drags you down? What should you call that?
It’s bizarre to call this a “strength” and tell you to make life decisions around it, since it’s something that drains the living daylights out of you. And yet this happens all the time. We display excellent performance in something, and then others pick up on this, label it a strength, and tell us to focus on it.
And in so doing—even with the very best of intentions—they wind up hiding us from ourselves.
Because what you should actually call it is a weakness. Properly defined, a “weakness” is any activity that weakens you, even if you’re amazing at it.
If, before you do the activity, you find yourself procrastinating, pushing it to the side of the desk, wishing it would fall off and vanish under the filing cabinet, this is a weakness.
If, while you’re doing the activity, time seems to slow down, and when it seems like three hours of work must have passed, you look up at the clock and see that barely twenty minutes have inched by, this is a weakness.
If, after you’ve done the activity, it’s clear that you’ve learned little, and what little learnings you’ve managed have worn you out, this is a weakness.
Where there’s no love, the activity is a weakness—even if you excel at it.
And, of course, a strength, properly defined, is any activity that strengthens you. Anything where you feel one of the signs of love is a strength: before you do it, you instinctively volunteer for it; while you’re doing it, time flies by and what seems like five minutes turns out to be an hour; and after you’ve done it, you discover that you’ve taken giant leaps of learning.
Even if you aren’t quite good at it yet, even if you still have a long way to go before you get good at it, your strengths are activities where you feel the signs of love. Your strengths are your red threads.
This doesn’t mean that your strengths have all the qualities of a red thread all the time. On occasion you may find yourself procrastinating on something, and then feel the time flying by when you actually start doing it. Or perhaps there’ll be occasions when you instinctively volunteer for something and discover, to your chagrin, that the doing of it requires more disciplined practice than “rapid learning” would suggest.
These occasions simply mean that you’d be wise to keep alert for any of those three signs of love. Often they are connected, sometimes they aren’t, but each of them will always lead you to a greater fluency in your own love language.
If you honor this about yourself, and really noodle on which specific activities have any of these red-thread qualities, you’ll make three quite powerful discoveries.
First, you’ll learn that while, yes, of course, practice helps you get better at any activity, the real key to success and satisfaction in life lies in identifying which activities you are drawn back to practice over and over again. These red threads—these activities that you love—pull you back to them, so that the practice doesn’t feel like something you are deliberately doing, or even something that you’re forcing yourself to do. Instead, the practice feels like something you can’t stop yourself from doing. Practice is not a conscious discipline, demanding grit and stick-to-itiveness. Instead, seen through the lens of love, practice is an obsession.
Second, you’ll discover that these red threads show you your future. Your love for the activity drives repetition, which in turn drives improvement. So, by paying attention to your loves, you’ll gain much clearer insight into what you’re likely to get really good at. Excellence ceases to be a mystery—is it natural talent, is it nurture, is it luck, is it the coach? And instead, excellence is revealed to be simply a product of you taking your loves seriously. Passion fuels practice fuels performance.
And third, you’ll realize that since your strengths are simply activities that you love, activities that strengthen you, by far the best judge of your strengths is you. Other people—your parents, teachers, coaches, managers—can judge your performance. They can weigh in on whether that essay is worth reading, that math problem is correctly solved, that customer is well served. But only you know which activities you love, and which you loathe. You are the sole authority on which activities create in you those signs of love, and which don’t. You are the only one you can trust.
If you say that you love the thrill of persuading others to buy what you’re selling, then no one can contradict you. Sure, they can say, “Well, I don’t think you’re explaining your products in enough detail” or “You’ll be more persuasive if you listen more than you talk” or “You’re not following the company’s standard sales script.” They can tell you any one of these things, and they have a right to do so.
But what they cannot do is say, “No, you don’t love persuading people.” Because you know what you love better than anyone else does. You knew it as a young child, and you know it now. The fact that, over the years, others have tried to tell you that your loves aren’t real, or relevant, doesn’t change the truth that you feel what you feel.
When it comes to your loves, you have all the answers. No one else has any. When it comes to your loves, you are the only genius.