You can’t go wrong building your career on strength.

Job descriptions are written for robots. When a committee gets together to draft up a job description they likely don’t have a specific person in mind. They have a bunch of persons in mind who, when melded together, create the average person that would do well in that job.

This is problematic because it prevents you and I from pursuing jobs that are nuanced to our strengths. We see a generic job description and we’re underwhelmed. “That’s not me,” we may say.

It’s also a challenge because we have a tendency to take a generic job and melt into it. Rather than doing our job description and layering on what makes us very best we discard or ignore what makes us best and invest our energy in conforming to the position. In the short-run this earns big points. You are compliant and people like that because it means you are doing exactly what they hoped someone in that job would do — the job they defined.

In the long-run this is a losing strategy. Your whole value-add is your uniqueness. That’s what you bring! The job description is simply a foundation for you to magnify what you do very best — your strengths.

True, you have to do the basics well before you can branch out into your strength. But most people never branch out and become robotic in the execution of their jobs. Integrate what you do best into what your organization needs you to do and you’ll thrive.
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So what do you do best? Go do more of it.