Focus on your strengths or work on your weaknesses?

In My Humble Opinion
1

This comes out of the long lived weightlifting thread, where @Dr_Paprika mentioned how he has never had any interest in running a marathon partly because it is so far removed from what he’s good at. My response, part joking but also serious, is that my advantage is that I am not very good at anything (athletic, and therefore not married to any specific class of activity). I do suspect that those innately with a type 2 muscle predominance tend to strength and sprint training, and with type 1 to endurance, as most of us enjoy more what is easiest for us to do well in.

But it got me considering the broad mindset of it, beyond fitness, for everything: as individuals are we best off focusing on developing our strengths to their max, or on identifying and remediating our weaknesses?

My WAG is that the answer lies in diminishing returns. There is some point of diminishing returns to time invested in each. But I think in general we (myself included) mostly avoid the working on weaknesses part and excessively focus on our strengths.

2

To some extent I believe it depends on the strength of your strengths and how critical your weaknesses are. In general, I think the best strategy is to work on any critical weaknesses that are causing severe problems, until at a manageable level. But you can’t be good at everything and your strengths are what help you succeed in life as well as differentiate from others and make you you.

So after improving on critical weaknesses it is better to work on your strengths. It is also important to have enough self-awareness and trustworthy feedback to know what your strengths and weaknesses are. You can sometimes delegate weak areas or get assistance when likely to be needed. It may not be possible to improve every deficiency, but it is likely possible to mitigate things.

Two concepts from the business world might help. One is the idea of “satisficing” solutions: being “good enough” instead of great. The other is SWOT analysis, many things can be quickly analyzed considering not only strengths and weaknesses, but potential opportunities and threats. It might be hard to be a perfect parent but it is much easier to be one that is “good enough”.

Once your weaknesses are “good enough” or the opportunity cost of improving them is too high, work on your strengths. As said, this is not what most people do. Some people don’t acknowledge any weaknesses, yet are still able to run for presidential positions.

Running a marathon is not in my foreseeable plans, but if I did the goal would be to finish. I would not worry about metrics. I believe I could finish a marathon. It just is not remotely a priority.

3

In general, I’d argue that building your strengths is more important. In the process of doing so, a lot of your weaknesses tend to naturally fall away or improve.

The exception would be if your weakness happens to be something particularly serious or harmful, such as severe alcoholism or drug addiction, for instance, in which you need to focus wholly on kicking it ASAP.

4

I agree that it depends on how important the area of weakness is. As a personal example, I submit my lack of success in dating when I was in high school and college. At the time, I thought my weakness was my physical appearance and that my strength was my intellectualism and intelligence. As such, I focused on academics. Looking back now (I’m in my late 40s), I now realize that my lack of social skills was a much bigger problem, and I would have been better served working on that rather than on focusing mostly on intellectual pursuits. So yes, working on a weakness if it’s in an area of importance to you is more important than working on a strength. But if the weakness is in area that isn’t important to you, then it’s better to focus on your strengths.

5

Thanks for the responses. I’m shouting to our teachers as well as I think it is a thought process in education as well: @Left_Hand_of_Dorkness, @MandaJo? Any others that don’t immediately pop into my head - thoughts?

6

I don’t worry about my weaknesses, but I do work on my flaws, the things that actually hold me back.

7

My perspective as an elementary teacher–specifically, one who works with academically advanced students–may give me an approach that’s not universally applicable.

The incident that stands out most in my mind was from working with a kid more than a decade ago. He was a third-grader who came to the first day of class with the copy of Hunger Games that he was reading (normally more of a grade 6-9 book at least), so I knew he was a voracious, advanced reader. When I conferred with him on his reading, I adjusted accordingly: instead of just seeing whether he could read the words on the page, or even summarize, I asked him something like, “Oh, I love that book [Percy Jackson]! You’re near the end, and I remember that Chiron really changes his attitude toward Percy from the beginning of the book to the end. I’d like you to take a minute and think about that change, and write a few sentences about it.” This sort of dynamic character growth question is not something most third graders can do, but I wanted to see his attempt.

Next time I checked in, he’d done nothing of the sort. When I asked him why he hadn’t written anything, he shrugged and said, “I’m just not good at that kind of thing.”

And it blew my little teacher mind, such that I still think about it a decade later.

When working with academically-advanced students, I very often encounter this attitude: kids think that being smart means not struggling. These days, on the first day I meet with students, and a million times throughout my time with them, I promote the value of struggle. Learning happens when you work hard at hard work. When you tell me you’re “just not good at that kind of thing,” my eyes light up, and I say, “Amazing! Then that’s exactly what you should work hard at, so you get better at it!”

But that’s for kids. For adults, the rules are different.

8

As a parent to one adolescent and one pre-adolescent, this is something I think about a LOT. My older one in particular has one extreme strength and some profound weaknesses, as well as lots of other qualities which are neither.

Yeah, we have been focusing heavily both on her strength and her critical weaknesses, for exactly this reason. Her strength is what’s going to set her apart from others (and is already doing so). But her critical weaknesses were ones that I worried were going to hold her back – and I still worry about it, but we are just working them as much as we can, and I prioritize activities that will help her work on those critical weaknesses or her strength over other activities. (Sometimes we find an activity that does both at once, and then I am willing to go to a lot of trouble for that!)

Stuff that’s neither her massive strength nor a critical weakness – well, as long as she’s having fun, it’s not like she can’t do it, but it’s not prioritized. There are other activities that she does (as per the OP, cross-country is one of them, this year! Which she is not particularly good at natively, but it’s been fun to see her improve. In this case, she does it because her school makes her do some kind of physical activity, haha) and that I like her to do as I think they’re nice for being a well-rounded and overall healthy human – but they get deprioritized if they interfere with the other things.

9

I teach English and Social Studies at a STEM focused school, so I spend most of my days encouraging people to shore up their weaknesses.

From a purely strategic PoV, in life you are often surrounded by people of similar strengths, so doubling down there isn’t a way to stand out. For me, Ive been pretty successful in the AP English Lang world. Like, within a very small pond, I’ve been very successful and, among other things, made a lot of money. When I look to the people i was, I dunno, promoted over, theres easily hundreds who are as good or better than i am at the English teacher skills needed for my job. But my skills are plenty good enough, amd then I am unusually good at dealing with computers and basic data analysis. Or at least, good for an English teacher. It was the skills that went against type that made me able to step into more exciting roles.

For my STEM-oriented students, my poibt is generally that the “better” they do in terms of college and first job, the more likely they are to be surrounded by people who are just as stong as they are in math and coding, so, again, even being the best of the best won’t really help. Everyone in the room is good enough. In that group, skills like the ability to communicate idwas or to sell people on a visio or other “soft” skills will be the traits of successful people.

Now, a second set of skills isnt the same as a weakness, but it is perhaps working in a sphere where you’ll never be a rock star. For myself, I wouldn’t say I ever tried to shore up my weaknesses, but rather that I did follow my interests even when they didn’t align with my talents.

Somehow, in the last 2 years me (48) and my mother (78) have gotten really into Minecraft. Neither of us are remotely good at the game, but wow, we’ve had a lot of fun working together. So I am definitely a fan of learning thongs even if you’ll never excel, just for fun.

10

IRL, my answer is an enthusiastic “Hear, Hear!” for @Dr_Paprika’s well written analysis: paper over the gaping holes, but otherwise focus on your strengths, or at least where you’ll improve with a reasonable amount of effort. Mostly, those holes (some people, some circumstances excepted of course) will never get “good” even with many times the effort you could otherwise expend elsewhere. And @velocity makes a good point that some of those weaknesses aren’t just in terms of skills, but can be quite literally fatal flaws!

An exception of course, is when it’s NOT real life. In most TT-RPGs and video games as an example, the jack of all trades performs terribly compared to a character that plays to strengths. I mean, sure, in 3.0 or 3.5 D&D, you could -make- your fighter take (their pathetic 2) points in off class skills, and be able to negotiate (poorly) or be the studious sort, but you’d never be GOOD at it. Or you could evenly take multiple levels alternatingly in multiple classes, but outside a few tactical levels (especially if going for a prestige class) you’d be better off predominantly going for one main class.

Yes, it’s a narrow scope of Min-maxing, but given the habits of many of us on the board, it’s one that enters their lives more often than min-maxing their physical, social, intellectual, financial, et al skills that is our total living gestalt.

Again, YMMV. Lots of games (or difficulty settings, or GMs) are more generous than others!

11

What I’ve done, without thinking much about it, is participate in a career and activities built around my strengths, which get stronger through practice. For example, I’m good at web stuff, and took a volunteer job as web master, which has expanded my understanding through necessity.
I work on things I’m weak at if I care about being better at them. I like to walk, I’ll never do a marathon, even when I was more physically able. Example here is that I felt I didn’t know anything about classical music, so dove into it. I now know slightly more than nothing, but it’s an improvement, and the best I can do being tone deaf.

12

This–and the rest of the post–is an excellent take.