The Case for Taking the Easy Path |
Since childhood, we’ve all been sold a story about what it means to grow as a person. Confront your weaknesses! Identify your inadequacies! Find what’s broken! And then get to work fixing yourself.
Performance reviews zoom in on “areas for development” while self-help books urge us to leave our comfort zones and to seek out what is difficult. The message is clear: Your deficits define you and you should follow a path in life that is devoted to minimizing them.
One of the reasons this perspective has become so embedded in our culture is because it makes intuitive sense. Overcoming weaknesses is a path to expanding our capabilities and evening out our opportunities. If you’re terrible at public speaking, shouldn’t you work on that? If you’re disorganized, shouldn’t you build better systems?
Yes—but only to a certain point. In some cases, we do need a baseline competency in critical areas; in others, we may even need mastery at things that don’t come naturally. For example, if you’re a brilliant engineer who struggles with communication but you also want to be a CEO, then you’re going to have work very hard at becoming genuinely good—not just competent—at communication.
But this doesn’t mean we should live our lives viewing ourselves as bundles of inadequacies. And it doesn’t mean that we should default to spending our limited time and energy on what’s........