How can a weakness become a strength

You can either choose to accept your weakness and see it as a roadblock or an obstacle, or you can turn it into your strength and learn how to use it as a stepping stone to your success. One of the most commonly asked questions when it comes to your strengths and weaknesses is if you should work on improving your weaknesses.

Sometimes, you will have no choice but to learn to improve your weaknesses in order to go further and faster. Imagine you are driving with the handbrakes on.

And to go faster, you can step on the pedal and press forward. Or, you can release the handbrakes and that allows your car to go faster and smoother. Improving your weaknesses is like releasing your handbrakes. I like how Scott Young puts it in his blog post:. What I am arguing is that focusing on your strengths might not be the best outlook. Sometimes, focusing on your strengths give you good results.

And sometimes, improving on your weaknesses give great results. Now that you know that you should focus on your strengths and whenever possible, improve on your weaknesses. But how do you do it? Here are a few suggestions:. You can only fix something when you know it is broken. Hence, the first step to improving your weaknesses is to recognize them and so that you can make a conscious effort to overcome them. So, what are your weaknesses? What are you bad at? If you have no idea what or where are your weaknesses, read this article:.

How to Identify Your Strengths and Weaknesses. Once you knew what are your weaknesses, a very good way to overcome them is to make yourself be extremely prepared for it. For example, if your weakness is that you have a very bad sense of direction, before you make your move, just be prepared and map out your route. When you need to deliver a presentation to a group of clients, you prepare and rehearse it many times before you actually deliver it, right? Preparation makes you feel confident and it is one of the best ways to improve your weaknesses.

When you look at all the successful entrepreneurs and businesses, you will discover that nobody is perfect and everyone has their own strengths and weaknesses. And those who know how to leverage the strengths of others are the ones who make it big. And no better way to empower the people who work for you. Even though you may never be great at all tasks, some are important enough that it's worth the extra effort to learn more, practice, and achieve minimal competence.

A very smart entrepreneur I once knew headed up an internet company even though he himself had no technology skills. Though he trusted his team, he wanted to learn enough about what they did to be able to tell when they could meet deadlines and when they really couldn't, what was truly possible and what wasn't. As he put it, he learned "just enough to be scary. That's a smart approach. There are many things we should all be able to do on our own, at least to some degree. That's especially true if you're going to hire and manage people doing those jobs.

If not having a skill you need is a problem for you, you can be sure it's a problem for others as well. Many successful launches come about because the founder needed that product or service him- or herself. So think about ways you can help both yourself and others compensate for your deficiency.

Your weakness could wind up leading you to a successful new venture. Top Stories. Top Videos. Getty Images. So what can you do? Find ways to turn your biggest weaknesses into strengths. Here's how:. Sponsored Business Content. The incumbents would need to unlearn some of their long-standing habits to make rockets the way SpaceX does.

The Japanese art of judo, for instance, teaches you how to turn the weight and force of your opponents against them. In its early days Pepsi used this approach to challenge the soft drink front-runner, Coke, pursuing a variety of strategies that Coke was loath to copy. Luckin already has 3, locations Starbucks has 4, and is growing fast.

Attempting to use the size and premium positioning of Starbucks against it, Luckin is pricing low and building simple stores — most are small booths — optimized for cashless pickup or delivery. Starbucks is responding with its own delivery service and express store format, betting that it can successfully occupy two different market positions.

Say your business is focused on its important customers. Before you know it, you start losing mainstream customers who now value the new dimensions. This dynamic has been playing out in recent years between traditional colleges and universities and online education. But online education is also open access and often free. But most colleges and universities are probably overly focused on the weaknesses of online education today and not paying enough attention to the serious threat it could pose in the future.

The lesson for incumbents in all industries is that initially weak- or unimportant-looking competitors may lull them into a false sense of security. Form two teams. Have Team A list all the strengths it sees in your organization, and Team B list all the weaknesses. Then have the teams swap lists. Next, do a similar external analysis: Ask Team A to list all the strengths it sees in your competition, and Team B all the weaknesses.

Again, have the teams swap lists. Ask Team B to argue that the strengths listed are opportunities for your organization, and Team A argue that the weaknesses constitute threats. This exercise will open your eyes to many possibilities that otherwise might never occur to you.