Your greatest strength has an expiry date
Building on what you’re good at isn’t enough if you don’t know that changes too.
Any amateur tennis player knows that changing rackets is both exciting and agonizing. Exciting because, beyond the novelty of something new, it opens up a chance to improve your game; agonizing because, as you quickly discover, there's no perfect racket, and you have to accept what's known as trade-offs. The possibilities are endless, so we end up relying on recommendations from friends and coaches, and test three or four rackets, ideally under similar conditions.
But once you've done that, the real torment begins. You might gain more control than with your current racket, but lose power. Or get more speed at the cost of control. Choosing a racket, then, means choosing which trade-offs you're willing to live with for the next eight or ten years, if all goes well. Do I need more control now that I'm getting older and points last longer? Or do I stick with the fast game I've always enjoyed, even though it's so physically demanding and costs me control at the back of the court?
Peter Drucker, in his excellent book Managing Oneself, says it's essential to know yourself so you can build on your strengths rather than your weaknesses. He explains that building on your weaknesses can only take you from incompetent to mediocre, while building on your strengths can take you from good to excellent. So which do you choose?
Knowing what you're good at, though, isn't that simple. And even though Drucker offers an effective method in his book, we can't predict how external conditions will change, nor how we ourselves will react to those changes. In tennis, for instance, the passage of time brings physical changes that can mean a racket that worked for you at 20 won't work at 50, and even less at 70. But it also brings psychological and emotional changes, which might make us calmer on court and, as a result, more confident. Everything changes, and so do we.
The same mechanism plays out in business. Think of the business owner who grew the company thanks to their sales ability: they're the one who closes the big deals, the one who knows every key account. At 2 million euros in revenue, that strength is the engine of the business. At 8 million, the same strength starts to become a bottleneck: everything still runs through them, and that limits how far the company can grow. The strength itself hasn't turned bad, it's that the context has changed and now something else is needed.
That's why the decision you need to make today, whether it's about the racket or the opportunity in front of you, comes down to one uncomfortable question: is what got you here the same thing that will take you further?
© Oriol López Villena 2026