Fix your weaknesses or enhance your superpowers?

When you decide that there is something you’d like to better at doing, there are two possible reasons:

1. It’s a weakness of yours that you want to improve.
2. It’s already a strength of yours, but now you want to take it further.

Finding the balance can be tricky. If you’re a baseball player who is a good hitter but a poor fielder, which one should you work more on? Should you try to become an excellent hitter, or work to make your fielding less of a liability for the team?

The answer is likely “both”, but your daily efforts will lean one way or another.

Personally, I’m more of a “fix a weakness that I want to improve” kind of person. This is why I have things like Anki to help fill in my knowledge gaps. I try to play both sides a little bit, but I generally focus more on shoring up my weaknesses.

Gary Vaynerchuk seems to disagree. In his book “ Twelve and a Half “, Gary says:

But I don’t overstress this point, because most people work only on their weaknesses, not their superpowers. Yes, I want to level set my weaknesses, but I’m more interested in taking my strengths to the moon.

Gary’s case is interesting. Generally speaking, he’s done a great job of taking his “strengths to the moon”…