Strengthen Your Strengths, Not Your Weaknesses
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A few months back I was catching up with a friend in a noisy (okay, mostly from our table) restaurant. We were squished into a dark corner on one of those too-small-for-food bar leaners with warm, pillowy bread and olive oil and woodfired eggplant wedged between us. A negroni for me. A glass of red for her. And we were doing what we do best: exchanging unsolicited advice.
Liv had recently come out of a long-term relationship and seemed to be doing so….well? And, honestly, it threw me! Because isn’t one of the hardest parts of breaking up with a person you’ve been with for so long figuring out how to fill those parts of your day/week/life that were previously occupied by your significant other? And yet here she was sitting across from me and, by all accounts, thriving. When I pressed further, she said she’d been heeding the advice given by a friend, and I guess she was now giving it to me: “I’ve been working on strengthening my strengths.” Liv said she’d started painting again. And cooking. She’d been walking more too. Each day a little further than before. But there were no new brushes or tricky ingredients, and she never felt pressured to swap her walk for a run. Instead, she was consciously and intentionally doing more of what she was already good at.
What Liv’s friend, and now Liv, had realised was that her strengths were her gifts. Not her weaknesses. And sometimes, in the midst of a major life change like a breakup (or a pandemic), to fixate on improving your shortcomings isn’t actually “self-improvement”; it’s punishment.
Albert Einstein said, “Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live it’s whole life believing it is stupid.” What I think he meant was: It’s okay to be shitty at some things. You wouldn’t tell an Olympic swimmer he needed to be better at tennis. Or a long-distance runner to invest more into her shotput. You wouldn’t judge an ocean for its vastness or compare its shape to a river. A rose looks nothing like a sunflower but you can’t tell me both aren’t beautiful.
In most businesses there are two kinds of people: generators and workers. Generators are the “ideas” people. They think big picture. Generators are highly creative, constantly moving, and usually spend more time out of their desk chair than in it. They’re also rubbish at the practical stuff - which is fine because that’s what the workers are good at. Workers are analytical, thoughtful and purposeful. They intuitively understand numbers and logistics, and they notice details a generator would miss. They’re the ones who stop the business from going up in flames by making sure it doesn’t fly too close to the sun (which would happen if the generators were left to their own devices). A generator should never be told their numerical skills are letting a business down, and a worker should never be pressured into dreaming up the next big idea. And you cannot convince me that one is more important than the other.
What I learnt that night from Liv, squished into the dark corner of that too-small-for-food bar leaner with warm, pillowy bread and olive oil and woodfired eggplant wedged between us, was this:
If you’re a fish, don’t lose sleep over how well you walk. Just swim.
Liv had recently come out of a long-term relationship and seemed to be doing so….well? And, honestly, it threw me! Because isn’t one of the hardest parts of breaking up with a person you’ve been with for so long figuring out how to fill those parts of your day/week/life that were previously occupied by your significant other? And yet here she was sitting across from me and, by all accounts, thriving. When I pressed further, she said she’d been heeding the advice given by a friend, and I guess she was now giving it to me: “I’ve been working on strengthening my strengths.” Liv said she’d started painting again. And cooking. She’d been walking more too. Each day a little further than before. But there were no new brushes or tricky ingredients, and she never felt pressured to swap her walk for a run. Instead, she was consciously and intentionally doing more of what she was already good at.
What Liv’s friend, and now Liv, had realised was that her strengths were her gifts. Not her weaknesses. And sometimes, in the midst of a major life change like a breakup (or a pandemic), to fixate on improving your shortcomings isn’t actually “self-improvement”; it’s punishment.
Albert Einstein said, “Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live it’s whole life believing it is stupid.” What I think he meant was: It’s okay to be shitty at some things. You wouldn’t tell an Olympic swimmer he needed to be better at tennis. Or a long-distance runner to invest more into her shotput. You wouldn’t judge an ocean for its vastness or compare its shape to a river. A rose looks nothing like a sunflower but you can’t tell me both aren’t beautiful.
In most businesses there are two kinds of people: generators and workers. Generators are the “ideas” people. They think big picture. Generators are highly creative, constantly moving, and usually spend more time out of their desk chair than in it. They’re also rubbish at the practical stuff - which is fine because that’s what the workers are good at. Workers are analytical, thoughtful and purposeful. They intuitively understand numbers and logistics, and they notice details a generator would miss. They’re the ones who stop the business from going up in flames by making sure it doesn’t fly too close to the sun (which would happen if the generators were left to their own devices). A generator should never be told their numerical skills are letting a business down, and a worker should never be pressured into dreaming up the next big idea. And you cannot convince me that one is more important than the other.
What I learnt that night from Liv, squished into the dark corner of that too-small-for-food bar leaner with warm, pillowy bread and olive oil and woodfired eggplant wedged between us, was this:
If you’re a fish, don’t lose sleep over how well you walk. Just swim.