The United States Men’s Gymnastics team recently broke a long medal drought and came in 3rd place at the Paris Olympics.

Their final performance was by Stephen Nedoroscik. Nedoroscik is a two-time NCAA national champion and four-time US National champion for the pommel horse.

While the rest of his team participated and competed in the other events (rings, vault, floor exercise)…Nedoroscik sat with his eyes closed, meditating like a Jedi.

When it was his time to compete, with Team USA needing a great performance from him to secure third place, Nedoroscik nailed his routine.

The result: a bronze medal for Team USA, invitations to every talk show in America for Nedoroscik, and internet immortality:

Stop focusing on what you’re bad at

On a recent episode of the Sharp Tech podcast, co-host Ben Thompson shared the best career advice I’ve heard in a long time.

He talked about how most people are given terrible career advice, and thus spend their time focusing on the wrong thing:

“People are so hyper aware of what they’re bad at.

They spend so much time trying to get better at what they’re bad at.

You will never [receive outsized returns this way].
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Figure out a series of hacks, systems, put yourself in a position where your weaknesses don’t matter…

and what matters is your strengths so that you become so unique and powerful that companies will hire a hundred people to take care of everything you’re bad at.

They don’t want you wasting your time on what you’re bad at, they want you doing what you’re great at.”

For Thompson, that’s Stratechery – a paid newsletter that I gladly subscribe to because it’s the best tech analysis on the internet.

Although Thompson co-hosts multiple podcasts, they all assist and improve his strengths:

• He answers questions from his paying audience on Sharp Tech, which helps him further refine his messaging and philosophy.
• He co-hosts Dithering with John Gruber, which lets him battle-test his ideas with another leading tech analyst.
• He interviews tech CEOs and industry leaders, allowing him to ask the questions he wants answered.

All of these things further improve Ben’s main mission:

To write a killer newsletter for his paying subscribers.

That’s it.

(Speaking as one of those paying subscribers, Stratechery is worth every penny.)

Keep the main thing the main thing.

I started NerdFitness.com in 2009 by writing about topics that interested me. I wrote two lengthy, researched articles a week, every week, for about a decade.

As a result, I built a large audience (1.5 million visitors a month), and hired team of to serve the audience that popped up.

And this is where I got sidetracked.

Slowly, as my responsibilities grew and I got distracted, I started writing less and less. I chased shiny objects, random side projects, and things that pulled me away from my main mission.

I spent more of my time trying to become who I thought who company needed: a CEO, a manager, a leader. I read books on leadership and management and company building.

I spent half a decade trying to improve my weaknesses, at the expense of my strengths.

Finally, after years of feeling miserable about how I spent my time in my own company, I finally accepted reality and made some changes.

1) I built system to protect against my weaknesses: Somebody else now runs the day-to-day operations at Nerd Fitness, manages the team, and shepherds the business.

2) This freed me up to focus on my strengths: I “rebooted” this newsletter. It now goes out every Monday to 132,000 people! I am also working on a secret book-shaped-project, shhhh.

There are two main things I enjoy and want to get better at:

• Creating: This semi-regular newsletter, the NF newsletter, and the secret project.
• Connecting: Meeting up, connecting, and spending time with other creators (say hi on Threads or BlueSky), which makes me a better creator.

If I spend my work hours doing these two things, the rest gets easier or takes care of itself.

To recap: if you want outsized returns, or parabolic progress, double down on your strengths. Put systems or people in places to protect you against your weaknesses.

And then do whatever you have to do to keep the main thing the main thing.

-Steve

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