Weakness of Strengths
I make small mistakes.
Not big ones — I don't blow deadlines or forget important things — but the little stuff gets me. A typo in the doc I just sent. The wrong subject line. Sent to the wrong person, maybe. For a long time, I carried a low hum of embarrassment about this. Like, there was a more careful version of me I was supposed to be, and I kept falling short of him.
Then a coworker pointed out something that reframed it entirely: the same way I move through work — fast, building momentum, getting things into motion before they're perfect — was exactly why I could generate so much in a day. I wasn't careless. I optimized for speed. The typos weren't evidence of a flaw. They were the exhaust from an engine running at a certain RPM.
Here's the thing nobody tells you:
your weaknesses aren't separate from your strengths. They're the same thing, viewed from a different angle.
Think about the most decisive person you know. Quick to cut through noise, clear under pressure, rarely paralyzed. That decisiveness almost certainly comes with a shadow: moving past criticism too fast, undervaluing slower people’s opinions, occasionally making a crisp call on a question that deserved more uncertainty. The weakness isn't a character flaw living next to the strength. It’s not working against you. It is the strength, seen from the other side.
This matters because most of us carry a quiet list of things we believe are simply wrong with us. Too impulsive. Too in our heads. Not detail-oriented enough. And we assume the work is to sand those things down. But when you treat your weaknesses as defects, you often end up sanding down your strengths too.
The person who tries to slow their fast thinking down sometimes just becomes slow. The decisive person who tries to be more "collaborative" sometimes just becomes indecisive. You can hollow out the thing that made you valuable in the first place.
A better question isn't how do I fix this weakness? It's what strength does this come with, and how do I work with the whole package?
The next time you catch yourself in a moment of low-grade self-criticism — that quiet ugh, I did it again — try pausing before you decide to change. Ask: what is the strength on the other side of this? You might find you're not falling short of who you're supposed to be. You're just looking at the back of your best quality.
Caveday is a company aimed at improving your relationship to work. We write regular posts on Medium and send out monthly newsletters with productivity tips, life hacks, and recommendations. Sign up for the mailing list here.
Jake Kahana is a cofounder of Caveday. Sign up for his personal emails, called “The Email Refrigerator” here.