Double Down On Your Strengths!

Double Down: Why I’m Working This

I haven’t written in a while, and despite setting a goal for myself to start writing more, I’m not going to kick my own butt over not getting around to it. Actually, if anything my priorities and goals have been evolving over the past while and it’s been a great growing opportunity. Previously, I wanted to start up writing again to work on my ability to self-reflect. In all honesty, other factors came into play and this started to happen more naturally without forcing myself into writing more.

Now that my goals are changing again, I’m realizing that I need to come up with some creative solutions for addressing them. For total transparency, one of my hobby goals is creating a brand for my show car, Ignantt. It’s a fun hobby of mine, and in order to keep it going I’m looking into sponsorship opportunities to take things to the next level. Sponsors are interested in your social media reach, and rightfully so. They want to make sure they can reach a wider audience by working with you.

I’ve been active on social media for my vehicle’s brand, but I’m interested in accelerating this. One option I’m exploring is paid promotions, but like many people, I’m a little bit skeptical and I feel weird about spending money out of my pocket to do this. Social media marketing is certainly not a strength of mine, but I would love to work on that.

So that’s where my creative strategy comes in!

Focus on Weaknesses or Double Down?

I read a lot about focusing on your weaknesses to become better and more balanced, and that concept makes sense to me. It’s going to take trial and error in addition to consistent effort to become better at something. Time. Resources. It’s just the nature of the beast. I’ll give you a few examples:

I’m interested in strength training. When you’re looking to improve a lift, whether it’s your bench press, your squat, your deadlift, or any other lift, you need to actively train that movement. As a novice, you’ll quickly see strength improvements. However, as your body adapts these improvements slow down. If you’re trying to increase your one rep max and progress is stalling, it might be a great opportunity to train strength in other rep ranges that you’re lacking in. The side effect of this can be that your one rep max strength breaks through a plateau. Maybe you have a weak body part you need to build more strength in, and as a result, fixing this imbalance allows you to continue to progress in your strength. These are all examples of working on a weakness to become stronger in another area, and in this particular case it’s physical strength for a lift.

I’m also interested in bodybuilding. Similar examples apply here as with strength training because bodybuilding has a lot to do with symmetry and balance. Got big arms but tiny legs? You won’t do great on stage until you bring up your lagging legs because judges are looking for symmetry between your upper and lower half. Arnold Schwarzenegger was known for blasting his small calves until they were no longer a weakness. It’s about balance in bodybuilding, so turning your weaknesses into strengths is important.

Double Down to Reduce Risk

So why might I suggest that you double down on your strengths instead of just hammering away at your weaknesses? Well, in this case I’m looking to reduce risk in terms of time and money while taking a more slow and steady approach to working on my weakness. My blog for development and leadership has been more successful in terms of generating online traffic and ad revenue. It’s nothing crazy, but it’s been proven more successful than my other blogs or sites. For me to invest more time and money into this blog is actually minimal effort, minimal risk, and it’s also aligned with some of my other goals (which I’ll follow up about). In fact, instead of feeling like a forced scenario to write, I have some topics I’d like to write about because they’re recent learning experiences.

My thought process is that I can continue to use this blog to:

•  Generate a small amount of revenue
• Experiment with content creation in an area I’m stronger in and have more experience with
• Use my learnings to carry into a different area/domain but with similar goals

Generalizing My Double Down Strategy

While I absolutely believe balance in many things if very important, I think there are opportunities where you can double down on your strengths to help improve in other areas.

This boils down to:

• The area I’d like to improve in is something I’m lacking experience in and as a result, could be risky to heavily invest resources into
• I have an area I’m strong in that has potential carry over to my weak area
• My strong area can be used as a buffer to minimize risk (i.e. potentially use ad revenue from one to pay for ads for the other)
• Focusing on my strength is aligned to something I enjoy, so it won’t feel forced to work on it

Double Down Summary

While this may not make sense to do all the time, I think the timing works really well for me. I’m going to write a follow up to discuss particular examples of how I plan to execute this and how they relate to building the brand for my vehicle.

Can you think of any areas that you can double down in to improve another area in your life?

Nick Cosentino Principal Software Engineering Manager

Principal Software Engineering Manager at Microsoft. Views are my own.

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