Should professionals develop skills in their existing strength, or deliberately build skills in a different, complementary area, to advance their career?
4 recorded positions from 3 people, first said Dec 7, 2020. They do not agree — the readings below are what each one actually argued.
Double down on your existing strength rather than developing weaknesses
Reid Hoffman · Dec 7, 2020
Your default answer to 'should I fix this weakness?' should be no — instead play to your strengths and adjust your working circumstances around the weakness
You can only fix maybe one or two weaknesses, and many weaknesses are the flip side of strengths; better to hire people, buy tools, and allocate time to cover the gap
Scope: exception if the weakness is genuinely critical to the goals you want to achieve
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Harry Stebbings · Sep 28, 2022
Career advice to develop your weakest side is wrong — you should get extremely good at the one thing you're best at.
He is an emotion-driven investor, so the only things that matter to him are human psychology, incentive structures, frameworks and human ambition.
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Also on the record
Kipp Bodnar · Sep 28, 2022
The way to 10x your career is to develop skill in the opposite of what you're already best at — an analytical person should build emotional brand-building skills.
Very few people in the world can combine analytical and emotional skills, so the combination makes you exceptionally rare and valuable.
42:42 Developing the opposite skill to your strength makes you rare and 10x your value
Kipp Bodnar · Sep 28, 2022
For maximizing money, doubling down on your existing strength is right, but for getting 10x better at something you must go elsewhere, because you can't get 10x better at what you've already done for twenty years.
The question was how to get 10x better, and marginal improvement in a long-practiced skill is capped.
43:23 Doubling down maximizes money but developing elsewhere is required for 10x improvement
Your assistant can query this graph directly — 4 positions here, 19,646 across the corpus. Add 996.fm over MCP.