August 11, 2026
The Strength That Becomes a Weakness
A mentor once told me something his own mentor had told him, that my biggest strength in my twenties would become my biggest weakness in my thirties. It took years to understand exactly what that meant.
A mentor told me something once that his own mentor had told him, and it's stuck with me since. Your biggest strength in your twenties will be your biggest weakness in your thirties. I was twenty-nine when I heard it. It took me a few more years to understand what he actually meant.
In my twenties I saw everything as an opportunity. That's not a bad way to move through your twenties. I chased a lot of things. Some led somewhere, some didn't, and I learned from both. A lot of good things happened to me because I said yes constantly, without much filtering.
Somewhere in my thirties that same instinct turned on me. I'm a business owner now, with one major goal I'm actually pursuing, and every yes that doesn't move me toward it is a yes I can't afford anymore. I've turned down genuinely cool opportunities recently that don't get me any closer to where I actually want to go. So I cut them.
That's easy to write and hard to live. Multiple mentors told me the same thing on repeat for years before it landed. Get one thing done. I finally read the book everyone kept pushing on me and it amounted to the same instruction I'd been resisting the whole time. Stop doing so much.
The harder lesson underneath that one was boundaries, and I wish I'd learned it much sooner than I did. There was a lot of people pleasing wired into who I am, professionally and personally both, and none of it announced itself as a problem while it was happening. It just looked like being easy to work with.
Learning to put my foot down took real, intentional work, not a decision made once and finished. This isn't in my best interest, I need to respectfully decline. I still have to talk myself into that sentence some days. It doesn't come naturally to me even now.
I don't think the twenty-something version of me was wrong to chase everything that looked like an opportunity. I think he just didn't know yet that the same habit would need to be unlearned on a schedule, the way a strength always does once the job underneath it changes.