When encountering your weaknesses you have four choices: You can deny them (which is what most people do). You can accept them and work at them in order to try to convert them into strengths (which might or might not work depending on your ability to change). You can accept your weaknesses and find ways around them. Or, you can change what you are going after.
Which solution you choose will be critically important to the direction of your life. The worst path you can take is the first. Denial can only lead to your constantly banging up against your weaknesses, having pain, and not getting anywhere. The second, accepting your weaknesses while trying to turn them into strengths, is probably the best path if it works. But some things you will never be good at and it takes a lot of time and effort to change. The best single clue as to whether you should go down this path is whether the thing you are trying to do is consistent with your nature (i.e., your natural abilities). The third path, accepting your weaknesses while trying to find ways around them, is the easiest and typically the most viable path, yet it is the one least followed. The fourth path, changing what you are going after, is also a great path, though it requires flexibility on your part to get past your preconceptions and enjoy the good fit when you find it.
Asking others who are strong in areas where you are weak to help you is a great skill that you should develop no matter what, as it will help you develop guardrails that will prevent you from doing what you shouldn’t be doing. All successful people are good at this.
Because it is difficult to see oneself objectively, you need to rely on the input of others and the whole body of evidence. I know that my own life has been full of mistakes and lots of great feedback. It was only by looking down on this body of evidence from a higher level that I was able to get around my mistakes and go after what I wanted. For as long as I have been practicing this, I still know I can’t see myself objectively, which is why I continue to rely so much on the input of others.
If you are open-minded enough and determined, you can get virtually anything you want. So I certainly don’t want to dissuade you from going after whatever you want. At the same time, I urge you to reflect on whether what you are going after is consistent with your nature. Whatever your nature is, there are many paths that will suit you, so don’t fixate on just one. Should a particular path close, all you have to do is find another good one consistent with what you’re like. (You’ll learn a lot about how to determine what you’re like later, in Understand That People Are Wired Very Differently.)
But most people lack the courage to confront their own weaknesses and make the hard choices that this process requires. Ultimately, it comes down to the following five decisions: Don’t confuse what you wish were true with what is really true. Don’t worry about looking good, worry instead about achieving your goals. Don’t overweight first-order consequences relative to second and third-order ones. Don’t let pain stand in the way of progress. Don’t blame bad outcomes on anyone but yourself.
I’m sure Transcendental Meditation, which I have been practicing regularly for nearly half a century, helped provide me with the equanimity I needed to approach my challenges this way.
You shouldn’t assume that you are always the best person to make decisions for yourself because often you aren’t. While it is up to us to know what we want, others may know how to get it better than we do because they have strengths where we have weaknesses, or more relevant knowledge and experience. For example, it’s probably better for you to follow your doctor’s advice than your own if you have a medical condition. Later in this book, we will look at some of the different ways people’s brains are wired and how our understanding of our own wiring should influence which choices we make for ourselves and which we should delegate to others. Knowing when not to make your own decisions is one of the most important skills you can develop.
Believable parties are those who have repeatedly and successfully accomplished something, and have great explanations for how they did it.
There are many things people consider “good” in the sense that they are kind or considerate but fail to deliver what’s desired (like communism’s “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs”). Nature would appear to consider them “bad,” and I’d agree with nature.