The real problem was internal. It was Greg.
I realize that for much of my life I’ve struggled with a certain dilemma.
On the one hand…
As a roofing contractor, many years ago, I got stuck. While I was making a good living I was not enjoying the work enough. One of the reasons for that was that I had not yet come to grips with the reality that I could not do it all. I think many entrepreneurs and perhaps others can relate to the idea that when faced with a problem we tend to think we are smart enough that we should be able to figure it out. I certainly did. As a roofing contractor, I now know that I made a number of strategic decisions about how to run my business that were strengths, but also limitations. Some of those strategic decisions played into my weaknesses. (Yes, that was stupid, but I didn’t realize at the time that is what I was doing, because I still thought I was smart enough to figure everything out.) I was a poor delegator and I needed to find and hire some key talent. In my next vocational iteration, I became a commercial roofing consultant. I was much, much better suited to this and I enjoyed it much more, also made a good living at it and then I ran into the same situation. I needed to hire some key talent and delegate and I still didn’t feel comfortable doing it. But, what I did understand at that point was this: I was again facing the same problem. It was just being presented to me in a completely different context. The problem was not being a roofing contractor. The problem was not being a roofing consultant. The problem was not other external circumstances. The problem was just being presented to me through external circumstances. The real problem was internal. It was Greg.
On the other hand…
There are truly many sources for this bit of wisdom, but I will quote and credit Donald Clifton who expressed it this way, “You will excel only by maximizing your strengths, never by fixing your weaknesses”. There is interesting research that backs this up in a very compelling way. Now, in the short tale above, there was a part of me that was very tempted to address the problem by working on my delegation (and related) skills. After all, I largely still believed I was smart enough to “figure it out”. But I already knew the value of playing to one’s strengths too and that line of thinking suggested I should ignore that particular “Greg problem” and instead just focus on the things I was already particularly good at and work to make them better. And that is what I chose to do.
But it was not and is not simple or easy.
The decision to focus on what I was already good at and work to make it better sounds great and it sounds like an easy choice. But it wasn’t (and isn’t) clear or simple. I had never really spent much time thinking strategically about what I was actually really good at, what that looked like, how that might express itself in my behavior. While I had gotten to the point of accepting that I did not have “all the answers”, I felt pretty blind about where I should specifically focus my attention. Actually, I felt really blind. I knew, generally, the direction I might go and I certainly by this time in my life had a general understanding of my strengths and weaknesses, but I was also very clear that I did not have sufficient perspective on how all of these things interacted to really be able to see the direction I might go. So, I decided to do what I’ve always recommended to others. I asked others for help! I did a number of digital assessments, but the one that was most valuable was asking others what they saw in me. (This is commonly known as a 360 report). I had resisted doing this initially because it required a level of vulnerability that my ego disliked and the rationale against it was that I felt most people would respond at a superficial level that would not be all that helpful. About the latter, I was right, but also wrong. Though many of the responses did seem a bit superficial, they also clearly focused me on seeing myself from a number of different perspectives that pointed to things that were very much in plain sight that I just had not seen. Getting the information took a couple weeks. Processing it was messy and took a number of months. But a suitable level of clarity emerged and once it did, the picture started becoming clearer and my life and my decisions got much easier.
So, while the struggle between the first and second approaches has been resolved, it was not an ending, but more of a start. I am now very aware that I can’t figure everything out for myself, but as I evolve there are aspects of the challenges I take on that expose that tendency in a more subtle, insidious, “refined” way. It often takes me quite a while to figure out that this is what I am trying to do. Meanwhile, I’m also trying to play to my strengths, but it becomes more important (and maybe trickier) to more sharply define what those might be.
Yes, I now have a good idea what they are, but as we grow, some of those strengths can actually become weaknesses relative to whatever the challenge is we are dealing with. In essence, I need to continually work to strengthen my strengths, focusing on the strengths that are already stronger. It feels a lot like Sisyphus must have felt, constantly rolling the boulder up the hill. And in my experience, the higher you go the steeper the hill. It has become a never ending iterative process with each iteration getting tougher to work through. But each time I do it I emerge in a better place.
Until next time… start reading, start noticing, start thinking differently…time to wake up!
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This issue was originally published by Greg Hayne on Substack.