When I was a kid, I worked on a little project and tried to get a screw to go into a hole. No matter how hard I worked, it wouldn’t go in.

My dad saw me struggling and said, “Don’t force it.”

There was a different way to make it work, and he showed me how.

If I had forced the screw, I would have destroyed both the screw and the hole it was going into.

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Last week, my work team got together for meetings and team-building activities. Before the meetings, we each took the StrengthsFinder assessment. The results revealed our weakest and strongest personality traits. (For those who know the tool and are curious, my strongest area was Input, followed by Connectedness.)

Our teacher shared that it may not be good to focus all of our energy on improving our weaknesses but rather on finding ways to best serve using our strengths.

That is not to deny the need to improve our weakest areas but to discover that leaning into our strengths will provide a more satisfying and productive life.

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Paul Merrill writes here every first Friday.

Photo by Jimmy Nilsson Masth on Unsplash.