How do you work on your weaknesses?
Playing to your strengths comes to most of us intuitively, but how do you play to your weaknesses to improve?
Life tends not to get easier, rather you get tougher and better able to deal with the problems it throws at you.
A key element of getting strong is to pass through the inflection point of greatest weakness, this idea is pervasive in history and covers many truisms from ‘the truth will set you free’ — a call to look at the reality of matters — to ‘what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger’, again, the idea being that within pain and weakness you can grow.
A sapling tree is the single greatest potential that tree will likely have, the mighty oak started as one, and indeed, it is while a sapling that many trees die.
This isn’t a comfortable situation, but to understand where challenging your weaknesses provides you with some of the greatest opportunities both in life and other endeavors is a simple truth to great to pass by.
Think about something you aren’t good at, or a part of your life in which you lack the self-control or results you’d ideally like to have. It could be a messy room, carrying too much weight or maintaining toxic relationships.
‘The truth will set you free’ implies that understanding and knowing that there is an issue is the first step towards liberation, the second is your own action, that is to make the change that will get the better outcome, that may mean doing the cleaning required, eating less, exercising more or spending less time around certain people.
Often we view our ‘weaknesses’ as just that, something that makes us more fragile, but this is a facile interpretation. The underlying truth is that weakness is where your growth comes from — once you get strong it’s hard to gain ever more strength, that’s the foundation behind the concept of diminishing returns.
This leads to a simple conclusion, your future strength is not to be found in greater strength of the things you are already good at, rather it comes from the growth of strength in the things you are not strong at.
