One thing that I noticed as I began studying the lives and advice of those who are living on their own terms, was that they encouraged you to look past your weaknesses and focus on your strengths.

 

According to Tim Ferriss, author of the iconic The 4-Hour Workweek, leveraging your strengths is going to be many times more profitable than attempting to shore up your weaknesses.

 

Entrepreneur extraordinaire Gary Vaynerchuk says you should triple down on your strengths. He says “go all in on your strengths and you will win.”

 

I’m a big fan of this advice, but it seems incomplete. Surely, there must be times where it is beneficial to fix your weaknesses, right?

 

This article is my attempt to break down exactly when to fix your weaknesses and when it is better to focus on your strengths.

 

Focus on your strengths as long as you don’t have any critical weaknesses

 

Just to be clear, I think that the majority of the time the advice to focus on your strengths is the right advice. You are going to get as far in life as the amount of value you are able to provide to the world takes you. You can provide more value in the areas that you are strong than the ones where you are weak, so this is what you should do.

 

The general rule is to figure out what you are good at and to leverage your strengths to provide value to others.

 

As Tim Ferriss points out, fixing your weaknesses only provides incremental value. Leveraging your strengths can scale massively and multiply your efforts significantly.

 

So why would you ever focus on fixing weaknesses? Because certain weaknesses aren’t minor flaws, they are Achilles heels that will be your undoing if not addressed.

 

During my time thinking about this issue, I’ve come to the conclusion that the main category of critical weaknesses are negative or unhealthy mindsets.

 

Your mindset ultimately governs your actions and your actions are what most directly determine your results. If you have a bad mindset, you won’t get the results that you want. It really is that simple.

 

Here are some of the main critical weaknesses that you might need to work on. All bad mindsets exist on a spectrum, and you might not be all the way on the wrong end, but wherever you are you should strive as much as you can to move to the better side.

 

Critical Weaknesses to Fix:

 

The Fixed Mindset

 

Do you believe that you can become more intelligent? Do you believe you could get better at music? Be a better athlete? Become a better artist? Acquire more talent?

 

Chances are that you believe that maybe in certain areas where you have shown potential, you have room for improvement. But there are probably several areas where you tell yourself you are a lost cause. You just aren’t good at music. You’re just not that intelligent.

 

You probably look at others who excel in areas where you are weak and think that they are “natural talents.” Chances are, you are telling yourself this story to let yourself off the hook. If they are natural talents and you are not, you no longer need to justify why they have exceeded your abilities.

 

The fixed mindset essentially tells you that you are destined for a certain skill level in any given arena, and that you more or less have already actualized close to your true potential.

 

In this mindset, you can improve, but not by much.

 

If you’re not already good at music it means that you’ll never be good at music. If you are good at music but have never been the best in your peer group, you’ll never be among the best in the world.

 

The alternative to the fixed mindset is the growth mindset. This is the view that your potential for improvement in any given arena is, for all intents and purposes, limited only by the amount of deliberate practice you are willing to put in. You can make exponential gains in any arena that you are willing to go through the pain of the learning curve.

 

The fixed mindset causes you to settle where you are. The growth mindset causes you to eagerly move forward.

 

You’ll see that the most common similarity between unhealthy mindsets is that they are paralyzing. They prevent you from taking beneficial steps forward. They keep you stuck where you are. One of the most important keys to success in any endeavor is to keep moving forward.

 

One of the critical reasons why a growth mindset is so much better than a fixed mindset is because a fixed mindset causes you to avoid failure at all costs. Under a fixed mindset, failure is a shameful confirmation of your own inabilities which can’t be fixed, so they have to be hidden.  Under a growth mindset, failure is a stepping stone to success. The fact that you fail at something doesn’t mean that you can’t do it, it means that you can’t do it yet.

 

To what extent do you have a fixed mindset?

 

For most people aspects of the fixed mindset is very deeply embedded. You might have read the list of questions at the beginning of this section and thought that intelligence really is more or less fixed. Or at least the capacity to learn. I promise you that you can increase your capacity to learn. It’s not easy to do or to even believe, but there are people who do it.

 

The Pessimist Mindset

 

In her excellent book Grit: the Power of Passion and Perseverance, Angela Duckworth describes optimists as those who are always looking for the temporary, specific causes of setbacks, while the pessimists are the ones looking for the permanent and pervasive causes.

 

In other words, if an optimist angles for a promotion and doesn’t get it, they assume that there is a reason that can be identified and fixed. A pessimist on the other hand is looking for a reason that is harder to overcome. They just don’t promote analysts to managers. They really want someone with a graduate degree, etc.

 

As you might guess, these mindsets (like all mindsets) can very easily become self-fulfilling prophecies. You assume there are insurmountable obstacles to promoting, so you stop trying. Because you stop trying, you never promote and fulfill your own prophecy.

 

According to Duckworth, there is ample evidence to assert that optimistic mindsets lead to better outcomes than pessimistic ones. She says that optimists are more likely to get better grades, to graduate, to have a happier marriage, and to be better sales people. Pessimists are more likely to be clinically depressed.

 

In one study, elite swimmers took an optimism test to determine if they were optimists or pessimists. They were then asked to swim a race and were told that the swam the race slightly slower than they really did. They were then asked to repeat the same event. Optimists performed equally well the second time, but pessimists performed significantly worse.

 

Optimism builds a resiliency to setbacks. Pessimism leads to getting defeated by setbacks.

 

Wherever you are at in life, if you assume that your situation can improve, you will naturally begin to search for solutions to your problems, and the act of actively searching makes it extremely likely that you will stumble upon the solution you need. If you assume that your situation simply can’t improve, you’ll stop looking, which makes it certain you won’t find the breakthrough you are looking for.

 

You could argue until you’re blue in the face as to whether optimism or pessimism provides a more realistic depiction of reality in any situation, but that misses the point completely. When you are dealing with self-fulfilling prophecies, always choose the one that leads to the better outcome.

 

The Scarcity Mindset

 

This is another one of those mindsets that seems to exist to let you off the hook. The scarcity mindset says there is only so much to go around. Things like wealth and success are sort of like a pie, if you take too big of a slice, there isn’t enough for everyone else.

 

This means that if you aren’t where you want to be, it’s not your fault. It’s those darn greedy rich people who took enormous slices and left nothing for the little guy.

 

The scarcity mindset becomes a very paranoid one. You are deathly afraid of losing what you have, because there is only so much to go around. When it comes to making money, you’re unlikely to dedicate your time to any endeavor that you can’t clearly see where an immediate payoff will come through. Additionally you see others as competitors rather than potential collaborators.

 

The alternative to the scarcity mindset is the abundance mindset. The abundance mindset says that value and wealth can be created. We’re not limited by the size of the metaphorical pie, we can make the pie bigger or create new pies. Life is no longer a zero-sum game.

 

People who have an abundance mindset are freed to look for ways to help others, believing that the more value the create, the better off everyone will be.

 

People with an abundance mindset tend to admire rich and successful people and will closely study them to see how they can follow their example. Those with a scarcity mindset resent rich and successful people. If you have a scarcity mindset, Bill Gates is a bad person, regardless of how much value he has created for society and how generous he has been with his fortune. He took and absurdly large slice of the pie and screwed the rest of us over; he’s a villain to be demonized, not a hero to be emulated.

 

The scarcity mindset crushes collaboration, prevents you from learning from the best, and gives you ample excuse to stay stuck where you are. It should be avoided at all costs. Your focus needs to be on creating more abundance in the world.

 

The fixed mindset, the pessimistic mindset, and the scarcity mindset are all critical weaknesses that have the potential to keep you from going anywhere in life. Weaknesses of mindset are fatal to your goals in a way that weaknesses in your skill set simply aren’t.

 

If you there’s a weakness in your skill set, you can outsource that job to someone else. If you have a weakness in your mindset, you have to fix it if you want to move forward.

 

Your thoughts and beliefs are what drive your actions and your actions ultimately determine your results.

 

Focus on Strengths as an Entrepreneur, Fix Your Weaknesses for Mastery

 

A large factor in determining whether you should focus on strengths or weaknesses is what your goals are.

 

If you are an entrepreneur, wanting to build something bigger than yourself, you need to focus only on the areas where you can contribute at a high level.

 

This is because entrepreneurship is not a road you have to journey alone. Although the automation capabilities of the internet have made the concept of a “solopreneur” more viable than ever before, the best way to build something bigger than yourself is to enlist the help of a team.

 

As an entrepreneur, you should be focused on the best value that you can bring to the table. You’ll get further faster by outsourcing your weaknesses, and speed is crucial.

 

Leveraging your strengths allows you to focus on speed and execution.

 

On the other hand, if you are in the game seeking to master a skill, if you’re trying to become the best in the world at something, you need to focus on shoring up your weaknesses. This is because while you might have the help of a team in terms of coaches and mentors, at the end of the day you will be the one performing.

 

If you are training to make the Olympics in swimming or are practicing for a career as a performing musician, you need to be focused on improving your craft by fixing your weak points.

 

An important caveat here is that you aren’t fixing all your weaknesses, only the ones that directly relate to your main pursuit.

 

Specifically, the process of improvement you should be engaged in for the mastery of a skill is called deliberate practice.

 

Deliberate practice is not something the average person engages in very often. It is the uncomfortable practice o pushing yourself beyond your current limits. It comes with a lot of failure and is mentally exhausting.

 

According to Angela Duckworth, even world-class performers can only engage in deliberate practice for about an hour at a time and most can only squeeze 3-5 hours in a single day.

 

At it’s core, true deliberate practice requires four components:

 

1. A clearly defined “stretch goal”
2. Full concentration and effort
3. Immediate and informative feedback (especially negative feedback, or “constructive criticism”)
4. Repetition, with reflection and refinement.

 

When she considers how rarely these four components simultaneously exist, Duckworth speculates that the average person today engages in zero hours of deliberate practice per week.

 

If you are having trouble coming up with a reasonable “stretch goal,” you might need to start this cycle at step three, using feedback to figure out what you need to be working on.

 

Some endeavors have the advantage of providing immediate feedback. Music is a good example. If you hit a wrong note on the piano, you know it as soon as the sound waves reach your ear. For something like writing, you have to take the uncomfortable step of getting someone to read what you have written and give you their thoughts.

 

In a sense, deliberate practice is simultaneously focusing on your strengths and weaknesses. More accurately, it is focusing on your weaknesses within your strengths in an effort to improve your strengths.

 

Final Thoughts

 

You’ll never be able to fix all your weaknesses. Fix the ones that relate to mindset and the ones that exist within your strengths, and beyond that let your strengths lead you as far as they will take you.