🕺🏻 Overlooked Natural Strengths

We admire people who overcome adversity, believing the greatest skills are earned through determination. Yet, paradoxically, our strongest strengths often come effortlessly—and that's why we undervalue them.

Why do we dismiss what feels natural? When something comes easily, we think, "Surely everyone can do this," assuming ease signals insignificance. As the saying goes, "True virtue doesn't know itself."

For years, I overlooked my natural abilities: connecting deeply with people, telling compelling stories, and seeing overlooked connections. Growing up in a family of physicists and mathematicians—my father, both grandfathers, and my uncle—I felt pressure to excel in math. It symbolized rigor, discipline, and true intellectual achievement.

Yet my favorite classes were literature and history. Reading, writing essays, and presenting didn't feel like real work. They seemed too simple.

Encouraged by my family's belief that I disliked math due to insufficient effort, I dedicated myself wholeheartedly. I learned to enjoy it, excelled in competitions, and eventually earned a master's degree in mathematics.

Despite these accomplishments, I knew deep down that math wasn't my path to fulfillment or greatest impact. Ironically, the talents that felt "given" rather than earned—easy rapport, empathy, storytelling, and big-picture vision—were my true strengths. These effortless abilities enabled me to inspire, persuade, connect with others, and ultimately succeed in business.

It took me years to realize that ease isn't trivial. It's special because it's without effort.

What strengths have you overlooked because they come naturally?

Acknowledging your innate gifts takes courage because it means rejecting the cultural myth that value comes only from struggle. By trusting and embracing your effortless strengths, you step into authenticity, confident that who you naturally are is exactly who you're meant to be.

Until next Sunday,
George Levin
^{LinkedIn | Consulting}