Cultivate that and you will assist the rest. Every one would have excelled in something if he had known his strong point... Most do violence to their natural aptitude, and thus attain superiority in nothing.
Baltasar Gracián, 1647 (tr. Joseph Jacobs, 1892)
The saddest line in the book: everyone would have excelled at something. Not the gifted few, everyone, had they located the gift and fed it. Instead the standard operating procedure, at school and at work, is gap-scanning: find the lowest number on the report and spend there. Decades of that produces the tragedy the maxim names, superiority in nothing: weaknesses patched to average, strength starved to average, everything average. The correction is a budget flip. Fix weaknesses to functional, no further. Fund the strong point to excellence, because careers, practices, and reputations are built on what you are exceptional at, never on the absence of weak spots.
Practice
- Locate the strong point honestly: what do people keep asking you for? What feels easy to you and looks hard to them?
- Split the budget: weaknesses get maintenance money, the strength gets growth money, time, training, stage.
- Design your role toward the gift; a job that uses your strength daily beats a better-paid one that rents your weakness.
Use this when
- Use this at every crossroads: postings, career switches, the second act after service.
- Use it doubly with your children: fund the highest number on the report card first, and watch confidence finance everything else.
Ignore this when
- Don't let the weak suits fall below functional; the specialist who cannot survive an interview or a spreadsheet stays undiscovered.
- Don't confuse comfort with strength. The gift is what you do excellently, not merely what you enjoy avoiding challenge in.
A picture of it
Two brothers inherit the family shop. The elder, weak with people and told so all his life, spends years on customer-facing courses, hating every shift, plateauing at adequate. The younger notices the elder's actual gift, a freakish memory for inventory and margins, and rebuilds the roles: elder runs sourcing and stock, younger runs the counter. Same two men. The shop's profit doubles in three years, entirely on rearranged strengths.
Average at everything is the most expensive achievement there is. It costs you the one thing you were built for.