Why Improving Your Strengths is the Best Investment You can Make

Why Improving Your Strengths is the Best Investment You can Make

If you have all the energy, time, and money in the world, where would you want to invest it? The foremost thinking on every investor’s mind is that their investment should not go wrong. Some may want to invest in health, some may want to invest in holidays, some may want to invest in learning, and some may indeed wish to invest in earning more money.

But there is one investment you could make where you’d never go wrong. It is investing in honing your primary strengths. In other words, the best investment you can make is an investment in improving your strengths.

Improve Strengths or Improve Upon Weakness

A colleague of mine asked me once – “Why should I invest in my strengths when I know those are already strong? Shouldn’t I be investing my time and efforts to improve upon my weaknesses and cover those up?”

It’s a fair way of thinking if you want to stay average throughout your life. As a human being, you come as a complete package of strengths and weaknesses in different proportions. I have personally had several encounters with individuals who believed that weaknesses were dragging them down.

As a result, they would then invest a lot of energy and time in an attempt to improve upon those weaknesses. In that process, they ignored developing and improving upon their strengths to the next level.

On top of this, focusing on improving your strengths makes finding success 10 times easier.

Your Weaknesses Don’t Pull You Down

Realistically, your weaknesses are not the complete opposite of your strengths. That means it would not necessarily drag you down in the opposite direction. On the other hand, your strengths are necessarily becoming less effective simply because of some deficiencies. It could be becoming less effective because you have stopped honing them to the next level.

Admittedly, you would have a slight edge by getting rid of your perceived weaknesses, but it would not ensure you any radical success. The revolutionary success enjoyed by most leaders and high achievers does not come because they won over their shortcomings. It comes because they identified their strengths and then used them strategically.

Strengths and Weaknesses Are Contextual

Be aware that the meaning of strength or weakness is contextual. A trait becomes a strength or weakness depending upon the context in which it is used.

One of my friends always used to talk negatively about most of the things he would see or encounter. He would expect the most pessimistic scenario, even in the most pleasant or positive occurrences. Usually, most people would call it a weakness. But the same thing gave him uncanny observation about things others would miss.

Later in life, he found he was extremely good at spotting risks, failure points, and hazardous warnings, even in a great-looking setup. He became a top-notch risk assessor with a large insurance company, safeguarding them against vulnerable, risky ventures. He became so successful with an unusual trait because he continued to improve his strength to the point of specialization.

Invest in Improving Your Strengths

You don’t have to get stuck into defining a trait as a strength and another as a weakness. All you have to do is find out what that one trait is, that you seem to exert far better than any other traits. Or isolate that thing that comes to you as a natural response to any situation.

Once you identify it, the most important thing will become how you use that trait to its full strength to charter your path forward, like the leader you are. And remember, leaders and high achievers focus on building their strengths, and so should you. 

The bottom line is this; you need to keep working on and improving your strengths, just like a woodcutter keeps sharpening his ax. Invest the time to work on your strengths, because if you do, the end result will be something you can be proud of; a better, stronger, and more valuable you.

This article first appeared in The Strive magazine, available here: https://thestrive.co/improving-your-strengths/.

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