The Truth Curve

A while ago, I watched a male cardinal sitting on my backyard fence.  He was scanning the horizon for something, probably for a female to woo.  How majestic and self-assured he seemed, yet foolish in his smugness.  Didn’t he know that his bright red color was going to attract the attention of every predator in the vicinity?  Doesn’t he know that his coloring is a weakness? 

He didn’t seem to be working on overcoming this weakness as far as I could tell.  He had only one thing on his mind and that was to attract a mate.  For the cardinal, his color, song, and display are meant to make him attractive.  He sings with gusto and puts all his energy into finding a mate despite the danger.

And therein lies the paradox.  Weaknesses and strengths are inextricably tied.  Every strength will have a weakness associated with it and every weakness points to a potential strength. 

How is this so?

First, pick one of your weaknesses.  What is it?  What have people complained about your whole life?  What do others find inconvenient or annoying about you?  What have you always considered to be one of your weaknesses?  Are you messy?  Lazy?  Hasty?  Are you critical?  Stubborn?  Stingy?

Your weakness is a byproduct — if you will — of a strength.  The strength shows itself in the methods and style you use to accomplish something.   Just as an organism produces waste products in the processing of food and in the creation of action, your strengths produce byproducts.  Whatever you are trying to accomplish in pursuit of a goal will have some sort of byproduct.  Some byproducts are positive of course but some are negative.  It is these negative byproducts that come across as weaknesses to others. 

Examine the weakness that you picked and ask yourself, “What am I trying to accomplish that causes this weakness?”  What are you trying to do or what are you working towards?

Perhaps you’re action-oriented (a strength) and you like to get things done.  You sit down with your to-do list and you just move through all the items with great speed.  Great, isn’t it?  Well, in your effort to get things done, others might see you as hasty or inaccurate.  You’ve gotten things done but maybe the things you got done have mistakes.  Does your boss write in your review every year that you’re not “detail-oriented” enough?  Or that you make too many mistakes?  This is a clue that your strength is “getting things done” but the byproducts are inaccuracy and lack of detail.

So what can you do with this knowledge?

If you are at a point in your life where you’re not sure what your strengths are or what you might be good at or what profession or calling your should pursue, take an inventory of your weaknesses.  Weaknesses are often easier to identify than strengths.  Then follow the trail back to the source.  What strengths do your weaknesses point to?  Once you’ve identified your strengths, you can figure out which profession might be best for you or how you can tweak your existing job to make better use of your strengths.

Once you’ve identified your strengths, what do you do about the weaknesses?  The answer is to mitigate them instead of trying to eliminate them.  People focus much of their attention on eliminating their weaknesses and not enough on developing their strengths and that’s a shame because success in life hinges on one’s ability to put one’s strengths to work and not on one’s ability to quash weaknesses.  Eliminating weaknesses is virtually impossible since the best way to eliminate a weakness is to weaken or eliminate the associated strength.   

For example, one of the most important issues facing us today is global warming.  How come no one is suggesting eliminating all the factories and going back to horses and buggies?  Because no one wants to give up the strengths — mass production and fast locomotion — to reverse global warming.  Instead, everyone is trying to mitigate the byproducts (the weaknesses).  Ideas range from growing and eating one’s own food to making more fuel-efficient cars to purchasing carbon offsets.

You should do the same with your weaknesses (no, not by purchasing weakness offsets… though that would be great if there were such a thing).  Ask yourself what you can do to mitigate your weaknesses.  How can you soften your hard edge so you’re not seen as abrasive or slow down so that you’re not seen as too hasty?  In what ways can you get assistance on the job so that you’re working from your strengths but managing your weaknesses so that they don’t interfere with your strengths?  Perhaps you can team with someone who has complementary strengths.  If you’re a doer who goes through the to-do list in short order, then pair up with someone who’s a thinker and will think through the consequences of the actions before moving forward.  If these tactics don’t work then you might consider the possibility that you are in the wrong job or career.

So, identify your strengths by looking to your weaknesses for clues, then work from your strengths and mitigate your weaknesses so that they don’t interfere with your strengths. 

Tags: Growth // 2 Comments »

At one point in my life, I dabbled in pottery making.  I fell in love with pottery making before I even knew how to do it and decided that this was going to be my craft.  So I bought a book on pottery making.  But there, in the chapter on throwing pots, the author said something about needing to throw a hundred pots before you can even master the first shape (the cylinder).  A hundred pots just to master one shape?  This clearly didn’t apply to me.

So I learned how to throw the clay onto the wheel and form a cylinder.  It was hard and messy and the results were predictably amateurish: a bowl that I made had a thicker wall on one side and a thinner wall on the other; the teapot that I made out of coils of clay was lopsided and reminded me of a gnome’s hat for some reason (not an effect I was going for).  So I dropped pottery making and moved on to yet another hobby that would surely be easier to master.

I used to believe that if you have talent, then it’s easy to create the piece of art you envision.  If I could only find the perfect medium — clay or watercolors or stained glass or whatever — I would create the beautiful pieces of artwork I saw in my mind.  But every medium that I tried proved to be horribly flawed: Clay was messy, stained glass was brittle and unforgiving, watercolor was… well, watery.  Twenty years and twenty abandoned hobbies later, I’ve begun to realize that my premise was not true.  Mastering a craft or a hobby is anything but easy and talent plays but a small part in the process. 

So, what is the key to a perfectly thrown pot with even walls?  Or a perfect golf swing?  Or becoming a world chess champion?  Not surprisingly, it’s practice.  But not just any kind of practice.  Ericsson calls it “deliberate practice.”  Just practicing for many years and gaining experience doesn’t guarantee a better performance.  There are plenty of people with decades of experience in their fields who don’t outperform novices.

Deliberate practice involves specifically practicing the hardest skills in a structured manner meant to stretch you beyond your current abilities.  For athletes or musicians, the coach might set lessons that get progressively harder.  The figure skater must practice the same jump 200 times until it is flawless; the pianist must practice each piece until the nuances of the music are just right. 

It’s always tempting to practice what you’re already good at but experts resist doing that.  Instead, they practice the skills that will push them to the next level of performance.  What separates the experts from the amateurs is the way in which they practice.  Amateurs either don’t practice in a way that would constantly push their skills further and further or they focus on perfecting that which they are already good at.  Experts, on the other hand, practice the most difficult skill over and over again, each time pushing the practice further. Ericsson says that the practice should never get easier; if it does, it means the person is coasting, not improving.

Why don’t more people do this kind of deliberate practice?  Because it’s hard.  It’s the kind of practice that requires a lot of exertion, leads to repeated failure and the reward is perhaps a 1% improvement.  A lot of people don’t want to work for a 1% improvement.  But it’s that 1% improvement - a tenth of a second faster for a swimmer or an extra jump for the figure skater — that will separate the gold medalist from the silver medalist.

What hobby or craft or sport are you trying to master?  Realize that it’s not talent that will get you to the top.  Instead, it’s practice… deliberate practice.

Tags: Goals, Growth, Psychology, Work // 1 Comment »