The Fish-and-Water Strength Test
Your real strength is the thing others praise that you think is no big deal.
- Difficulty
- Easy
- Time to result
- ~weeks to results
- Steps
- 4
- Confidence
- 93%
A single diagnostic question surfaces strengths you are blind to: what is something a lot of people say you're good at, but you yourself don't think is a big deal? Because a genuine strength feels effortless, you discount it — the way a fish would be baffled by praise for its swimming. Once identified, you trace the strength to its underlying resource, then map its shadow side: the same trait, dialled wrong for the context, is exactly what people call your weakness.
Origin
The question and the double-down-on-strengths philosophy come from Lawrence Ripsher, then head of product at Pinterest, who used Walter as the worked example while they prepared a Black PMs event at Pinterest. Walter extended it with the strength/weakness dial model.
Core principles
- 01A strength feels ordinary from the inside — that is the tell, not a disqualifier.
- 02External consensus beats introspection for identifying strengths.
- 03Doubling down on strengths beats grinding on weaknesses.
- 04Strength and weakness are not binary opposites; they are the same trait on a dial, read differently by context.
- 05Knowing the underlying resource behind a strength tells you how to get more out of it.
How to run it
- 1
Ask the question
List what people repeatedly tell you you're good at that you yourself dismiss as not a big deal or not important. Walter's list: networking (despite being a semi-introvert), asking great questions, being thoughtful, simplifying complex problems.
Pro tip Look for the praise that makes you shrug or say 'doesn't everybody do that?' — that reaction is the signal.
Watch out Do not filter the list by what you wish were your strengths.
- 2
Trace it to the underlying resource
Ask why you are good at this thing. The answer is the renewable resource you can deploy elsewhere. Walter traced 'asks great questions' back to genuine curiosity — a trait his mother recalls from childhood, unscrewing toys to see how they worked.
Pro tip Ask family and old friends; the resource usually predates your career.
- 3
Map the shadow side
For each strength, identify the context where the same behaviour reads as a weakness. Walter: asking blunt questions without framing his context made him sound junior; building an internal mental model before speaking made him look quiet and disengaged in meetings.
Pro tip Your recurring critical feedback is usually the shadow of a strength, not a separate defect.
Watch out Trying to eliminate the shadow behaviour usually destroys the strength that produces it.
- 4
Work the dial, not the switch
In each situation, decide whether to dial the trait up or down rather than trying to remove it. Walter now adds context before asking a question, and verbalises his thought process when he would otherwise go quiet.
Pro tip Name the dial position out loud when useful ('let me verbalise my thought process').
In the wild
Colleagues kept telling Walter he asked great questions; he thought they were basic questions. Ripsher's question reframed that as a strength rooted in curiosity. But someone at Slack also told him that sometimes when he asked questions he sounded more junior — because he asked plainly ('why did you do this?') without first signalling the understanding he already had. Same trait, wrong dial for the audience.
→ Walter kept the questioning strength but changed the framing — establishing context first, then asking the follow-up — turning a perceived junior tell into a senior one.
Walter's ability to compress complex problems (growth, product sense) into simple mental models requires him to sit silently building the model. In meetings, that silence read as disengagement rather than as processing.
→ Recognising the silence as the shadow of the simplification strength let him consciously narrate his thinking instead of suppressing the strength — 'I just have to dial down a little bit here or dial it up a little bit here.'
Common mistakes
Trusting introspection over external signal
Your strengths feel unremarkable to you by definition, so self-assessment systematically under-reports them. The data lives in what other people keep telling you.
Treating a weakness as a separate thing to fix
Most weaknesses are strengths mis-dialled for context. Attacking them head-on tends to blunt the strength while barely moving the weakness.
Spending your development budget on weaknesses
Ripsher's core claim — inverted by most performance-review processes — is that doubling down on strengths returns more than fixing weaknesses.
Is it for you?
Best for
Mid-to-senior operators who keep getting the same critical feedback and cannot see the pattern that produces it.
Not ideal for
Genuine capability gaps in a required skill you have never practised — those need deliberate practice, not a dial adjustment.
From the transcript
“he had this approach of how you actually find your strength. It's a very simple question where basically he's like, "Hey, what is something that…”
“An analogy, by the way, is imagine like you saw a fish and you're like, "Hey, you're really good at swimming." And then the fish…”
“So, a strength and a weakness is not a binary thing. It's like the same thing but it's a dial. In some context, it's like…”
“And then once you identify the strength, then it helps to also think about why are you good at this thing? Because that's the underlying…”
From the episode
Leveraging mentors to uplevel your career
Jules Walter (YouTube, Slack)