Letting Your Freak Flag Fly

In his article Freak Factor, David Rendall talks about how a person's weaknesses aren't necessarily a thing that should be eliminated. He suggests that every personality flaw has an accompanying strength. Below are the examples he used in his article to show strengths and their corresponding weaknesses.

Strength   Weakness
Creative - Unorganized
Organized - Inflexible
Dedicated - Stubborn
Flexible - Inconsistent
Enthusiastic - Obnoxious
Calm - Emotionless
Reflective - Shy
Adventurous - Irresponsible
Responsible - Boring
Positive - Unrealistic
Realistic - Negative
Assertive - Intimidating
Humble - Weak
Self-Confident - Arrogant
Patient - Indecisive
Passionate - Impatient

Rendall explains that he believes that our weaknesses are what make us unique or, as he says, "freaks". He goes on to discuss that in our society, people are valued for their uniqueness and that mediocrity isn't valued. I feel like this idea has some merit, however, I feel like compromise is the key to success in life. If your employer knows that you're a creative genius, he should take into account that your office is probably going to be a complete disaster. If he values you as an employee, he should be able to just stick a biohazard sign on your office door and wait for you to come up with something brilliant. This applies in all aspects of life. For example, your significant other might dislike that you can be arrogant, however, they admire your confidence so much so that it makes them want to stay with you.

In his article, Rendall talks about "Finding the Right Spot". He proposes that rather try to "fix" your weaknesses to fit into a specific role, that you find the right position that suits your strengths. I would agree that this is probably the best approach to having a successful career, however, especially in the media industry, I don't see how this is realistic. Ideally, his suggestion is a good one. However, with so few jobs, I find it hard to believe that there is really an attainable position that it tailored to me. While it is good to be aware of your strengths so that you can find a type of work that is suitable for you, I don't think that there is a job for everyone that's completely perfect for them where everybody will happily ignore your weaknesses and want to hold your hand and sing kumbaya. Call me a negative nancy, I call it being realistic.

Rendall also discusses that you can't work on both your strengths and weaknesses. He argues that because each weakness has an associated strenght, that trying to change your weaknesses only weakens your strengths. He suggests instead to improve your strengths. I can see how this would make sense. If you think about two strengths as a spectrum (see below)

 

If you take his example of patience being the opposite of passion, the farther you work towards passion, the less patience you have, if you're a passionate person and you work towards becoming more patient, you only move closer towards mediocrity. That's at least how I understood it.

Along those lines, he advises his readers to "Forget it: Don't try to fix your weaknesses". I think this is good advice because I think that if you can make your strengths strong enough so that they almost completely overpower your weaknesses, then people will be more willing to ignore your weaknesses in favor of your strengths. However, I also believe that people tend to find the negative aspects in any situation, therefore you have to work even harder to advance your strengths because you have to be pretty outstanding for people to completely ignore your weaknesses unless their desperate, which, let's face it, employers in the music industry certainly are not.