Why Building Your Career on Your Strengths Can Be the Worst Advice Ever
In the past few years, more and more people were encouraged to just follow their strengths and ignore their passions. Lots of gurus suggest that yes, you should always build your career on your strengths but what if you don’t have any passion for them? The truth is that yes, you do need to build up new skills out of your strengths to master your career. However, you shouldn’t just ignore your passion. If you want to build your career on your strengths alone, that will lead to burnout and other similar problems.
Passion without strengths is better than strength without passion!
Whenever you start working on a project that you want to reach success in, it’s extremely important to try and push your limits as much as you can. It’s crucial to push the boundaries and do the best you can all the time while learning from mistakes. But at the same time, you want to make sure you use your passion as a basic foundation.
Sure, having a lot of strength in a field is great, but that’s nothing without passion. It’s the passion that helps you grow, evolve and reach new heights. Plus, strength without any passion just leads to immediate burnout. If you’re working in an industry you don’t like, that can be a problem. You must follow your passion and remove those fears. Sure, you might have a stable job, but if it’s total misery every day, that’s definitely not the type of life you want to live. Instead, you want to pursue what you love and things will end up becoming a whole lot better.
Remember that your passion is the one that fuels your career and pushes it to the next level. If you have to choose between strength and passion, you should always follow your passion as that’s what will give you the amazing results you are dreaming of.
Think about your life and career as a project. Building your career on your strengths is not a guarantee for success if you don’t have a passion for it. But if build it on your passions, whether they lie in your strengths or weaknesses, turn your weaknesses into strengths. you can quickly. You always want to focus on your passion, but if you have strengths and passion in the same industry, that’s pretty much ideal. Yet if they contradict, make sure you don’t turn a blind eye on your passion.
And remember as Jeff Bezos said, “You don’t choose your passions; your passions choose you”. When you have a passion born inside you, it is born there for a reason. So keep noticing the passions that are born inside and don’t ignore them, test them, and give them sometime either to grow or fade away. Remember that truly successful people like Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, and others built their careers on their passions, not on their strengths. Their passions then became their strengths.
Don’t fall into the strength trap like what others did.
Why is passion important when you build your career?
When you are passionate about something, you don’t really perceive this as work. Yes, you still need to do it, but it’s not something problematic. Instead, it helps push the boundaries all the time, and you get to learn more. Think of your passion as your car fuel. your car won’t go anywhere without enough fuel to get to your next destination. Without fuel, you won’t goy a long way. You can be fast with your strengths yes, but only for the short run as you will burn out quickly if those strengths are not based on your passions. With passions, you can master skills quickly one after the other.
That makes passion a lot more sustainable when it comes to strength. Passion lies in both your weaknesses and strength. And yes, this will live a lot longer than you might realize. That’s why you should always pursue your passion, which will turn your weaknesses into your strengths. As soon as you do that, results can be nothing short of staggering.
Conclusion
If you start working in a field that you love, it won’t feel like work. That means you will be more focused, dedicated and reaching success will be a lot easier in the longer term. Obviously, it’s not always going to be simple to achieve what you have in mind. But once you are focused on your passion, your will start learning faster than normal. If you just focus on strengths, you remove opportunities for learning, and that can be a very challenging thing to deal with. We recommend you to take your time, assess what you can do, and follow your passion. It will eliminate a lot of challenges, and in the end, you will be impactful, fulfilling, and a fruitful career.
In The Passion MBA, we have built a practical step-by-step blueprint to empower professionals to figure out their passions, test them and grow the winners among them, then rebuild their careers or businesses on their passions. This scientifically proven process has helped dozens of professionals so far all over the world to find their dream careers and it can help you to find yours too.