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A Winning Career Strategy Starts With Your Strengths
What I learned from years of tending to my weak spots
“You may have done nine out of ten things right,” a former boss told me, “but it’s that one mistake that was glaring.”
I hated hearing that and refused to believe it. How can one bad thing outweigh everything else?
But here’s the bitter pill of life: When weighing up the positive and the negative, society generally places more emphasis on the latter. That’s our negativity bias; human survival relies on our capability to sense a threat, so it makes sense for our brains to point out what’s wrong, what’s lacking, or what doesn’t seem to “fit.”
This phenomenon has its way of manifesting inwards, too. We notice a gap about ourselves and can’t help but fret, “I am flawed. I must fill in this gap else I shall never unleash my full potential!” Even the expression “room for improvement” paints us this picture — a space that must be filled, attended to, or worked on. So what happens?
Our weaknesses appear front and center.
To craft a career — and ultimately a life — that matters to you while also having a good chance of succeeding, you cannot have your weaknesses in the driver’s seat. You need, as Nick Wolny put it in his newsletter, to “let your…
