The Strong Side

Self-improvement culture often tells you to start with your weaknesses, as if a person were a list of defects awaiting repair. Meanwhile we usually like what works out, and what works out better is what we take up willingly.

K. Anders Ericsson and colleagues studied how musicians train and proposed the notion of deliberate practice: sessions built around a specific weak point, demanding effort and giving immediate feedback. Popular culture later manufactured out of this work the convenient “ten thousand hours” rule, which was not in the paper.

The number of hours guarantees nothing by itself. Repeating a mistake is also practice — the person simply becomes a very consistent performer of the mistake. A strong side grows where practice is hard enough to change the skill but precise enough to show what exactly is changing.

That makes strong sides a good starting point. Someone who can already write, calculate, draw, persuade, notice detail or assemble mechanisms can build the next skill on top of it faster.

But a strong side can also become a refuge.

It is easy to do only what confirms your competence and to avoid activities where you would have to be a beginner again. A good programmer puts off public speaking. A strong speaker avoids spreadsheets. Someone used to grasping theory quickly does not want to go through the slow and awkward practice.

Use the strong side as a lever, not as a fence.

A talent for writing can help you study mathematics through detailed explanations. Spatial thinking can help you master anatomy or mechanics. Ease with people can help you find experts and ask them good questions.

You do not have to turn every weakness into a strength. There is not enough time for that. But it is worth telling genuine specialisation from carefully furnished avoidance.

Furnished avoidance looks respectable and therefore goes undetected for a long time. A department head who used to be a good engineer keeps fixing the hardest parts himself. He explains that it is faster this way, and that is true: he closes the task in an hour, and explaining it to a trainee would have taken three. Over a year the saved hours add up to a department in which the hard parts can still be fixed by one person — the same one, only tired and no longer getting the head’s own work done. Each individual decision was correct.

A strong side does not stop being strong because people hide behind it. What changes is the purpose: a lever lifts a load, a fence keeps people out.