Pip is taking her final exam for her pilot’s license. It involves spending half a day one-on-one with an examiner, first answering oral questions for several hours on the ground, then a flight.

To be eligible to even take the exam, students must complete a very specific list of requirements—for example, solo flights that have minimum requirements for the distance and number of landings. Before beginning the test, the examiner reviews your records to confirm you’ve met the requirements.

Pip has all her ducks in a row. She’s organized her papers so the examiner can see she’s checked every box. She makes a good first impression, and the exam starts well.

The examiner tells her he recently had to cancel an exam before it started because the student had missed one tiny requirement for being able to take it. Pip can’t imagine ever making that mistake.

If you’re like most people, you might overlook the value of strengths that seem boring or like they could be assumed. Here, I’ll show you how your quiet strengths can prove to be your most valuable assets. As you read, focus on the quiet strengths you already have, not any you lack.

1. Boring Skills Can Help You Speed-Run Achievements

Let’s continue our example of Pip. It wasn’t just during the exam that her organizational skills helped her succeed in getting her pilot’s license. She took that approach to her entire training. She made an efficient study plan, scheduled her training flights a month ahead of everyone else so she had the pick of the options, and arrived for every flight having done the optimal pre-reading.

What got her across the finish line before most of her classmates wasn’t her natural aptitude for flying—it was superior organization. Boring skills might not always determine who succeeds, but they will often determine who gets there first.

2. Boring Skills Can Help You Build Relationships (or Profit) by Helping Others Who Lack Them

In our opening example, Pip’s recordkeeping skills allowed her to form a good relationship with her examiner. During training, her classmates saw she was exceptional at keeping her paperwork organized. They would come to her to check theirs.

A lot of them found that aspect of training stressful. She didn’t. Classmates liked studying with Pip because she was organized, so she had plenty of help with what she found tricky.

3. Your Boring Skills Can Help You Leverage Other People’s Strengths That You Don’t Share

Let’s turn to another example of a quiet strength you might undervalue.

Pam is a sports chiropractor. She isn’t good at thinking big, but she is good at forming partnerships. Early on, she partnered with another clinician who excels at vision. She could see that her partner’s ideas for building a network of clinics were solid, and she went with them. Now they have a mini chain of six clinics spread across their region, and Pam has a lot of autonomy in her work, which she loves.

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We tend to think that only flashy strengths scale, but quiet strengths can scale too, and one way is through partnerships.

4. Reframe Challenges Around Your Existing Skills

Ruth is studying for the MCAT, a medical school admissions exam that requires months of preparation. She doesn’t view science as a natural strength, and certain science concepts can make her feel like her brain is going to break. However, her whole life, she has been commended for her reading comprehension skills.

As she studies for the MCAT, she begins to recognize that a huge portion of it relies on reading comprehension. For many questions, the hardest part of correctly answering is decoding complex passages and recognizing what type of question it is. Often, the actual science elements aren’t too hard once you’ve done that.

Her reframe helps her see the MCAT as a challenge that taps into her core talent of reading comprehension. That helps her feel more confident.

Reframing challenges as vehicles for our strengths can be taken a step further, too, which we’ll see next.

5. Boring Skills Can Help You Reach Goals in Creative Ways

Ruth noticed that reading comprehension is central to success on the MCAT. Pip noticed organization is very helpful in pilot training. Pam could see the value of someone else’s vision. Taking it further, we can go from just mentally reframing a challenge to actually pursuing it through an approach that is rooted in our talents.

Ruth might structure her MCAT studies based on which questions can be correctly answered based only or mostly on reading comprehension.

Pam might approach building a chain of clinics not as an entrepreneurship challenge but as a challenge of building key partnerships. When we view a challenge from the perspective of a particular strength, it can help us find routes to success that are novel, creative, and unexpected. We don’t need to take the approaches others do.

The Strengths That Seem Most Essential Often Aren’t

We often completely misjudge the skills that will be most important to our success. When Pip started pilot training, it seemed like students with the most natural aptitude for flying would succeed fastest. But in reality, it was students like Pip—the most organized in their learning journey—who passed their tests first.

People assume that improvement requires addressing their weaknesses, but overlook the potential of simply being more knowledgeable about their strengths. When we understand our strengths and how to leverage them, we can utilize them to their fullest effect.

***Try this yourself: *For an area you’re highly motivated to succeed in, identify a “boring” skill that on the surface doesn’t seem central to it but could be highly valuable. How could you better utilize that skill to propel your success?

If you’re not sure what your quiet strengths are, try answering these questions about your instinctive strengths, or these questions about “bad” traits that have hidden upsides.