What are you good at? Think about it for a moment. What skills do you bring to the table? What are your best qualities or habits?
Then think about your team at work. What is your team best at? What are your collective strengths?
Lastly, think about your entire workplace. What is your organization great at? What do you do well?
Give yourself a second, and really think about your strengths.
Now think about your weaknesses. Think about yourself, your team, and your organization. What do you do poorly? What do you need to improve on?
Now let’s consider one more thing: If you had an opportunity to improve one of these things — to double down on your strengths, or to better your weaknesses — which would you choose?
Many would choose to improve their weaknesses. That’s natural. People tend to focus on their own faults — I’m not good enough, I’m not smart enough, I’m not talented enough — and would love to have the chance to improve.
But my advice would be to do just the opposite: Do more of the things you already do uniquely well. Take the things you’re good at and truly master them.
Imagine for a second that you’re a Major League Baseball pitcher, pitching for a National League team. In the NL, pitchers have to hit, too, and even the best-hitting pitchers are, by any other standard, bad hitters. (Madison Bumgartner, one of the best-hitting pitchers ever, has a career .183 batting average.) Let’s say it’s the start of the offseason. You’ve got a few months to improve as a baseball player before the new season rolls around. So what would you do: Work on your hitting, and try to become a passable (but still poor) hitter? Or would you work on adding new pitches and becoming a dominant pitcher? The answer is easy: You’d work on your pitching. Baseball teams don’t need good-hitting pitchers — they need great-pitching pitchers.
It’s rare to find a true jack-of-all-trades. Most people specialize in just a few things — and that’s OK!
I started thinking about all of this a few weeks ago, when I was talking with a group of news organizations. Many of them were thinking about launching new newsletters, and trying to decide what to focus on. So I asked: What do you do uniquely well? What’s something you do that your fans fans already love? Many of them talked about their coverage of local news or sports or culture — the areas of expertise that their readers, listeners, and viewers rely on them for. That’s where to focus your attention, I told them. Invest in products to serve those audiences, and give them more of the things they already depend on you for.
There’s a great Steve Martin quote: “Be so good they can’t ignore you.” He’s right. Be so good they have to hire you. Be so good that your fans have to pay to get more of what you do. Identify your strengths — and work hard to get even better at the things you do well.
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I took that photo of San Antonio Missions pitcher Simón Castro — who later went on to pitch for the White Sox, Rockies, and As — back in 2010.