Stop wasting your time trying to become a well-rounded person.

Stop wasting your time trying to become a well-rounded person.

I'm not talking about a jack-of-all-trades who finds joy in gaining many skills, but rather the person who is constantly working on their character flaws to rid themselves of weaknesses in the name of becoming well-rounded.

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We've romanticized well-roundedness long enough, and it's doing damage..

When leaders place high value on well-roundedness and demand it in others, you're encouraging people to expend incredible amounts of energy on eliminating their weaknesses one-by-one. After all, if I don't have any weaknesses, maybe they won't get me in trouble or make me feel like a failure anymore.Maybe.

But if you don't have any weaknesses, you don't need others.

Build me a team of well-rounded people, and I'll show you a team of isolated, inward-focused, strictly independent people who don't lean on others to achieve things beyond their individual capacity.

They can't achieve greatness because they're not focused on being great. They're just focused on not being weak.

When team members don't feel like they need to hide or eliminate their weaknesses, and instead are encouraged to lean on other team members to complement where they lack, you get massive amounts of vulnerability, trust, interdependency, collaboration, and collective success.

When all team members can focus on their strengths and do what they do best, the team becomes well-rounded, not the individual.

Then the team achieves greatness because the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.