A Guide to Strength Stacking
How you can layer your strengths to succeed in unusual ways.
Matt used to be a lawyer. He got burnt out and disillusioned, and left the profession. However, he has retained all his lawyerly skills related to paying close attention to paperwork requirements, dates, and appeals processes.
He has moved overseas and is renovating some property while dealing with local building regulations. He’s much more skilled than the average person at navigating cumbersome processes.
Now that he’s away from the stress of being a lawyer for a big firm, he’s also a patient guy.
These strengths combine to help him have adventures in foreign real estate most people would shy away from.
What Is Strength Stacking?
Strength stacking occurs when the combination of several of your strengths is greater than the sum of their parts.
What Strengths Can You Stack?
Think of strengths you can stack in several buckets:
- Skills.
- Knowledge.
- Experience.
- Nature (e.g., temperament, likes, interests).
As we move through life we develop new strengths, which we then carry forward to our new endeavors.
Examples
A few examples will help make the concept of strength stacking clearer.
A personal example is that I like technology and automation, and I’m extremely persistent. I’ll spend twice as long automating something as it would take to do it manually. That can seem like a waste of time, but pieces of old projects often become useful later. This could be tools I spent a ridiculous amount of time battling to figure out, or memories of how I finally got something to work after hours of trying. Psychologically, I’m used to many failed approaches before one suddenly works.
Since many people might be feeling pressure to start using AI tools, or have an interest in them, but aren’t sure they have relevant strengths, I’ll give a couple of examples related to that.
Jan spent her 20s volunteering in countries where she didn’t speak the language. She learned the skill of not giving irrelevant context because it was important she was understood and it reduced confusion. Now when she’s working with AI tools, she applies the same skill: when the system accumulates too much old information, she strips it back to just the essentials so it works better.
Mandy developed the same skill but in a different way. She has been a recreational pilot for years. She has learned the skill of talking on the radio, in which transmissions need to be efficient and standardized. She also applies this skill to AI tools, removing unnecessary context when too much old context is cluttering their memory.
When we enter into a new domain, we often don't fully understand how our strengths are relevant to succeeding in that domain, until we've done extensive experimentation.
How to Find Your Stackable Strengths
Your stackable strengths are what make you unique and able to take on challenges others would feel overwhelmed by and avoid.
- To identify what your stackable strengths are, think back to roles you’ve had in your life, such as parent, student, team captain, sibling to five brothers, or server.
- You can also think about strengths that are weaknesses in some contexts. For example, being persistent, distractible, or fussy. Someone who is very particular and doesn’t just settle for an off-the-shelf version might’ve developed strengths like resourcefulness and taste.
- A strength you needed to develop to overcome a challenge, or even a trauma, might be relevant, like perhaps you developed particular skills during a time you had little money. It's important to see how strengths develop in a variety of ways, not just from hardship, so don't overfocus on this pathway, but acknowledge it.
- Lastly, consider experiences you've had, like places you’ve lived. You might've developed strengths from living rurally and needing to be self-reliant due to lack of services. Alternatively, you might've developed strengths from living in a high-density urban environment where you had to find peace and calm among busyness and crowds.
Most People Have a Rich Set of Strengths
Most people have a richer set of strengths than they give themselves credit for. Good meta-cognition and self-reflection can help you notice when a strength is helping you succeed at a new endeavor. We often don't fully understand our strengths until we're in contexts where they come to the fore. Try using the framework provided here to become better at noticing ways your diverse strengths are, or could be, relevant to goals you want to accomplish. In particular, observe how your strengths combine and help you be good at things in ways you didn't necessarily expect.
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