Being Smart About My Weaknesses

Recognizing my own inadequacies and then playing to my strengths has helped revolutionize my effectiveness and satisfaction at work and in my personal life.

I’ve said here before the real picture is that you can spend hundreds of hours working in areas where you’re not competent or skilled and you’ll only ever be average.

So should you ignore your weaknesses entirely? No.

For me, this is when I work smarter, not harder. Being smart about my weaknesses positions me to do meaningful work.

And being smart about my weaknesses means I categorize them as either essential or nonessential.

Essential weaknesses are necessary parts of the job, dream, or calling. For example, Say communication is a weakness of yours. Well communication is necessary in almost everyone’s job. You can’t just stop talking to people and sending emails. Communication, then, is an essential weakness. You can’t stop doing it and still be successful, even if you focus on your strengths entirely.

Nonessential weaknesses are things that can be ignored and the vision still achieved. If I’m a mid-level manager who doesn’t have a knack for administration, then I can (and should) stop doing it. (I’ll explain what to do instead in a minute.) Nonessential weaknesses can be ignored at little or no peril to the mission or calling. The upside is greater than any potential downside.

Categorizing your weaknesses does nothing for you if you don’t then act accordingly.

In the case of essential weaknesses, this either means spending an appropriate amount of time honing the skill, or setting aside realistic chunks of time to complete the tasks I know will take you longer since I’m not particularly good at them.

For nonessentials, this means doing one of two things. First, I can outsource the task to someone who has it as a strength. This is a win-win. I get relieved of a nonessential and they get to play to their strength.

Second, I can ignore the task altogether. This isn’t always an option, but when it is it’s worth considering. Think of a report you always do that’s not being acted on. If it’s not being acted on by anyone, what’s the point in having it? It would be wise to stop doing it altogether. The upside is having more time to do work that matters.

Being strategic about my weaknesses is a constant process of experimentation and trial and error. But I can be smarter about them. And it seems I’m better off when I am.

What I Want to Do, I Don’t Do

Most days I wake up and just try to do the things I want to do. Not in a selfish sense. I just mean I try to accomplish the things on my list that I want to accomplish for work or personal projects.

But more often than I like, that doesn’t happen. I accomplish something, but it’s not the something I was hoping for.

Sure, things happen and we have to be flexible sometimes, but what I’m talking about here is giving in to the Resistance. Those times when I don’t do the hard work to make sure the good work gets done.

Most of my life has been marked by not doing things I want to do because of fear, laziness, or lack of will power. It sucks, but it’s true. I was that way for much of my childhood and into early adulthood.

So now, when I try to wrangle the Resistance and do work that matters I have to fight back years of training in the opposite direction.

A big fear of mine is that when I look back at the end of my life I won’t be able to say I did what I wanted to do (which is simply what God wants me to do). That’s a healthy fear in some ways. It forces me to make short lists like I did the other night when I noticed myself drifting from taking the small steps and doing the hard things.

The funny part about me (and maybe you too) is that I usually know exactly what I want to do and I know what to do to get there. But somehow I still manage to screw that up. Luckily, I’m in good company. The apostle Paul noted the same in Romans 7:15 when he said,

“I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do.”

I can show you exactly what you’re doing wrong in your golf swing to hit the ball better. Clear your hips, leave your head down, rotate your hands over on the club a little bit. But if you asked me to show you how to do all that…well let’s just say I couldn’t deliver.

It’s the same with blogging for me. I can tell you how to have a successful blog, how to design it, what to write about, how often to show up, and so on. But when it comes time to do it, I do the opposite of my advice. I don’t write about one particular thing, I change the look too much for any brand to stick, I post sporadically. Maybe that’s just who I am and I should embrace it, I don’t know.

Mostly I just think it’s the old me coming back to haunt. They say it takes a long time to be good at anything, let alone successful. I’ve been blogging here for two and a half years now. That sounds like a long time, but I’m really just beginning to push through all the ways I try to run from what I want to do.

Anyways, I’m rambling now. This sounded great in my head. I knew what I wanted to do…

Be the Piccolo

Some people air guitar. I air violin. I listen to classical music on the way home from work sometimes. Say what you want, but it calms me down. Soothes me.

One day I heard the DJ explain the piccolo and what it’s like when it comes into a piece. I can’t find the quote for the life of me, but it went something like this:

The piccolo is a surprising instrument. It doesn’t blend in with the noise. When it comes on, it commands attention. It’s distracting, but in a good way.

I’m no student of classical music, so I have no idea if that’s true or not (but the lady who works for the classical station probably does). Either way, it’s important.

The point is this: the world needs more piccolos. It needs more people willing to interrupt the noise with something important. It needs people to speak to something deep. To beckon something inside us that yearns for more.

I want people who can command attention, not just crave it. People saying something that matters. Deep people with wisdom that strikes at the chord of humanity. Wisdom so insightful that people stop what they’re doing to listen because they can’t possibly ignore it.

The world needs to be distracted from itself. I need to be distracted from myself. To be grabbed by the shoulders and woken up. To be distracted from what I think is meaningful, which is really just distraction.

Every year I go to this awesome Christmas concert called Behold the Lamb of God. For the last few years, Jason Gray has been coming, which is AMAZING, because HE’S amazing. Anyways, each of the musicians comes out to say a few words and then perform one of their songs.

When Jason Gray starts to talk, the whole room just stops what it’s doing and pays attention. He’s captivating. He’s deep. He’s insightful. He’s a piccolo.

Some people want to be the guy who gets a room going. Who knows how to deliver a punchline and get the audience laughing. I wanna be like Jason Gray. There’s plenty of people out there to make you laugh, but there’s far fewer who can make you think and feel.

There are far more trumpets and violins in a symphony. I don’t have to be one of them. I can be the piccolo instead

I can interrupt something. Stand out. Command attention.

On Resistance

I’ve been facing a lot of resistance when it comes to getting started on tasks in my life. Not sure exactly why yet. I wanted to write something about it, but then I saw this post from Steven Pressfield and realized I couldn’t say it any better.

So here it is. I hope his words do for you what they did for me:

A thought to remember when we wake up each morning and confront anew that dastardly dragon:

Resistance comes second.

The Dream comes first. The dream of whatever work or enterprise or endeavor you and I are called to.

Resistance is the shadow cast by that dream.

Resistance is the equal-and-opposite-reaction of nature to the New Thing that you and I are called to bring forth out of nothing.

There would be no Resistance without the Dream. The Dream comes first. Resistance follows.

The other thing to keep in mind is that Resistance’s strength is equal to the power of the Dream. Big Resistance = Big Dream. No Resistance = no dream.

So if you wake up tomorrow morning overwhelmed with fear, dread, and negative energy, that’s a good sign. The massive shadow that you’re experiencing is being cast by an equally massive tree—the tree of your dream, your vision, your calling.

The negative implies the positive. The more daunting the negative, the more brilliant the positive.

Resistance has no power of its own. It’s a shadow, nothing more. As soon as we learn to look past the shadow to the Dream that has cast it, the shadow loses all power over us.

*The words in italics above are credited to Steven Pressfield. They are from his post called Resistance Comes Second.

How to Make Yourself Look Like a Genius

Everyone wants to have good ideas. Ideas, now more than ever, are currency in today’s economy.

Zuckerberg had a good idea. Steve Jobs had a few.

Where do ideas come from? How do you have one of the ideas that changes the course of history or makes the world better off?

Most people that want to stumble onto a great idea will exhaust every angle that’s ever been studied. They’ll read the books, do the google (is that a phrase?), and research the experts.

And not to say this is bad. There are certainly times in idea-mode where you need to do the work. After all, it would be embarrassing to think you came up with an easy way to share information online in just a few characters and then have your friend show you their latest tweet.

Knowing everything about a subject makes you an expert, not a genius.

We need both, that’s for sure. But you want to be a genius (or at least look like one), don’t you?

Over and over again in my life, I’ve found one underlying thread of commonality in all my great ideas:

They all came from something that had nothing to do with what I was trying to figure out.

I’m not the only one who felt this way. Leonardo da Vinci wrote in his notebooks of “connecting the unconnected” to find creative inspiration. For him, this consisted of things like throwing a paint-filled sponge against the wall and studying the shapes and lines it made. Apparently he created the bicycle after one such session in which it looked like a person mounted on a horse, but the horse had two wheels instead of feet.

I’m not saying throw a sponge against the wall (or am I?). What I am saying is if you want to be a genius, you need to start looking around more.

The genius of Jesus was his ability to relate the Way to things his audience would understand. A fishing story to a fisherman. A story of a wayward son to a culture of honor and shame.

C.S. Lewis had a knack for this as well. The genius of his work, especially Mere Christianity, is in his ability to make connections to everyday things to drive home his points. Here’s one example from Mere Christianity:

“Imagine yourself as a living house. God comes in to rebuild that house. At first, perhaps, you can understand what He is doing. He is getting the drains right and stopping the leaks in the roof and so on; you knew that those jobs needed doing and so you are not surprised. But presently He starts knocking the house about in a way that hurts abominably and does not seem to make any sense. What on earth is He up to? The explanation is that He is building quite a different house from the one you thought of – throwing out a new wing here, putting on an extra floor there, running up towers, making courtyards. You thought you were being made into a decent little cottage: but He is building a palace. He intends to come and live in it Himself.”

Boom. Genius.

That little nugget, connecting the unconnected, is the simple secret behind much of the genius in the world. It’s harder to do in practice than it seems. It takes a trained eye and an open mind, both of which are hard to cultivate.

What will you see today that makes you seem like a genius? What connections are there to be made in your life that no one else is seeing?

Remember, an expert can tell you anything about a subject, but a genius will connect it to something you never thought about and blow your mind in the process.