Strengths And Weaknesses

Jason Cohen, on his great blog, writes in this post on strategy that you should leverage your strengths rather than fix your weaknesses. There's more nuance in the article, but the gist is: Get your weaknesses to a point where they aren't debilitating, and beyond that, focus purely on your strengths:

Reversing weakness is hard, painful, likely to result in something merely neutral, not great, and is at high risk of failing completely.

This holds true even if we think AI provides everything we need to shore up those weaknesses. But even then, it's better to focus your efforts on leveraging AI in areas where you're strong, to achieve even greater leverage, than in achieving bland and mediocre results in areas where you aren't strong.

In my case, I use AI a lot in software development, where I consider myself relatively strong. But if I wanted to design a beautiful app—the type that wins awards for its gorgeous design—I would rely on an actual designer (who might be super-charged with AI) rather than muddling my way through.

By all means, use AI to get the weaknesses to a no-longer-debilitating level: In the app example, Claude Code can indeed produce a passable design, better than if I'd hand-roll it. But any effort on my part to push it toward the exceptionally good level would be wasted. Divide and conquer, and let each expert leverage their own strength.

In practice: What are you (or your business) already good at? Can AI help you double down on it?