Knowing your strengths but learning your weaknesses

Your strengths

I'm a big fan of doubling down on your strengths (and those of others you work with), to maximise your potential. Some might call it your "edge" or "competitive advantage". It's something I've learned over the course of my career both as a contributor and in a managerial role. Of course, it starts with knowing what you're good at. Usually it'll be quite clear what you're 10x better at than the Average Joe. But in case there's any doubt, some ways to identify strengths may be:

• Ask your peers, colleagues, friends to identify your strengths
• Find what you can easily outpace others at
• Look at your resume and see what you've spent an inordinate amount of time doing that others wouldn't have done

What's holding you back?

Once you know your strength, you can outpace others in execution. I think most people are extremely good at executing at something. This is all well and fine if the path to your goal is linear. However, often the path is non-linear and putting in 100 hours or 1,000 hours of work might yield the same results. So, the question then becomes, what am I not doing that's preventing progress?

It's good to take a step back and think about what's holding you back.

In my case, my strength is building things quickly, with a decade of coding experience to help me. But the roadblock inevitably waiting for me is how to market products well (vs. an average effort), how to identify the right target audience and finding the right go-to-market strategy. I've identified these gaps after noticing that others were doing it better (which becomes my fuel to improve). It's something I'm thinking about and I'll be working on to make sure those proverbial 1,000 hours don't go to waste!

What are your thoughts? Hopefully, you'll take that step back too, and ask what's holding you back.