Matt used to be a lawyer. He grew burnt out and disillusioned, and left the profession.However, he retained all his lawyerly skills—notably a keen attention to paperwork requirements, dates, and appeals processes.
He has moved overseas and is renovating property while navigating local building regulations. He’s more skilled than the average person at managing cumbersome processes.
Now that he’s away from the stress of practicing law at a large firm, he’s also a patient individual.
Thes strengths combine to enable him to pursue foreign real estate adventures 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?
Consider strengths in these categories:
- Skills
- Knowledge
- Experience
- Nature (e.g., temperament, likes, interests)
As we move through life, we develop new strengths, wich we then apply to future endeavors.
Examples
Here are a few examples to illustrate the concept of strength stacking.
For me, I enjoy 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 inefficient, but pieces of old projects frequently enough become useful later—tools I painstakingly figured out, or memories of how I finally solved a problem after hours of effort. Psychologically, I’m accustomed to many failed attempts before a breakthrough.
Given the current pressure to start using AI tools, or an interest in them, but uncertainty about relevant strengths, here are a couple of examples related to that.
Jan spent her career as a librarian. She’s excellent at research, organizing details, and understanding how people seek knowledge. She’s also agreeable with complex classification systems. These strengths translate surprisingly well to prompting large language models. She understands how to frame questions effectively,how to evaluate the quality of responses,and how to organize the output. She’s not a programmer, but she’s quickly becoming very effective at using AI.
David is a former teacher. He’s patient, good at explaining things clearly, and enjoys helping others learn. He’s also used to adapting to different learning styles. These strengths make him a natural at creating tutorials and documentation for AI tools. he can break down complex concepts into digestible steps and anticipate where users might struggle.
Strength stacking isn’t about having traditionally “valuable” skills. It’s about recognizing the unique combination of strengths you possess and finding ways to leverage them.
