Don't let your weaknesses get in the way of what you're doing well

Pitcher Zack Greinke achieved greatness by focusing on what worked best, not what needed improving.

Believe it or not, one of the best lessons I’ve ever learned about communications and outreach came from former Dodger pitcher Zach Greinke: Focus on your strengths, not your weaknesses.

Greinke, now at the end of his career, was a devastating pitcher in his prime. But he also had a lot of ups and downs. He struggled with anxiety early on, and nearly walked away from the game. He constantly tinkered with his pitches and overthought everything. Until one day, he realized that he was spending so much time trying to improve his fourth best pitch that it was detracting from his best pitch. He was going into tough situations in games throwing his worst pitches trying to prove to himself that he could throw them with success. And then as the ball flew over the outfield fence, he kicked himself for not throwing his best stuff.

That really landed with me. I can’t tell you how many times in my career I’ve obsessed over my weaknesses to the detriment of my strengths. And this is something that organizations do all the time, as well. They put tons of hours into social media when they have giant email lists. They try to do grass roots activism when their big strength is in their relationships with lawmakers. They submit op-eds when they’re on a first-name basis with every reporter in town.

I get it. It’s so easy to get caught up in your weaknesses. We live in an “improvement” culture, where we’re always striving to be better. Moreover, we look around and see other organizations doing something well and we want to do that, too. And sometimes, I suppose, success is boring, and we just want to do something new.

Imagine you’re a baker, and you’ve just made two kinds of muffins that you want to sell to people. You take a bite of the one in your left hand, and it’s absolutely delicious. Then you take a bite of the one in your right hand and it’s terrible. Does it make any sense to spend all your time baking new versions of the terrible ones and trying to sell them to people? But this is exactly what we do all the time in communications, and I fear, beyond.