Let’s improve our weaknesses!

I’ve got some things I like about myself and some things I dislike about myself. Vocabulary fails us here, so for convenience, let’s call them “strengths” and “weaknesses.”

HR reps don’t like to use the term “weaknesses” anymore. Now it’s something like “areas for improvement.” I’ll agree with them that there’s something unsatisfying about the term “weaknesses,” but “areas for improvement” seems far worse. What bothers me is not just that we’ve gotten so overly fuzzy and polite and self-esteem-oriented that we can’t dish [or take] honest and cutting criticism, but that we think of weaknesses as necessarily – as if by definition – something to be improved.

And that bothers me because I’ve bought into it. I have spent (wasted) an incredible amount of time and emotional energy dwelling on how to suck less. That would be fine if the world operated the way I expected, where I can improve anything I’d like just by wanting to—by reading about it and practicing it and trying really hard.

There’s some truth to that. You can get better at just about anything if you want to badly enough, but the important and messy part is that for some things the return on emotional investment leaves a bit to be desired, to put it gently.

Shaq had a lot of practice shooting free-throws, yet he was one of the worst free-throw shooters in NBA history. Was it because he didn’t care enough? Because he didn’t practice enough? Because he didn’t practice smartly? Sure, those are reasonable-sounding explanations. But I suspect there is a more accurate explanation: The same thing that made him a dominant center – his enormous, almost inhuman size – in some way constrained him to having to take his shots <5 feet from the rim. His hands were too fat, his wrists too stiff to be able to shoot a jump shot or a free-throw without us laughing at how ridiculous he looks. I’m certainly not saying that all “weaknesses” are that way – that they are tied to our strengths and are in some way constrained to suckiness – but I’m saying that some of them – maybe even a lot of them – are that way, and that matters because it ought to fundamentally change how we perceive and approach them.

Imagine if Shaq had put most of his emotional energy into improving his weaknesses. He would’ve made himself a marginally better free-throw shooter and jump shooter, sure, but probably far from world-class or even high school-class. And the more sinister part is that if he had focused on the wrong things – trying to fight the things that his hugeness made him suck at rather than trying to improve the things that his hugeness gave him an opportunity to be amazing at – then we probably wouldn’t be talking about Shaq the future-hall-of-famer and maybe not even Shaq the NBA player.

That analogy has helped me think through my own “strengths” and “weaknesses,” because I suspect that Shaq's size is to his strengths and weaknesses what my “Hyperactive Conscious Mind Disorder (HCMD)" is to my own.

I call it HCMD half-mockingly and half-seriously. The term “disorder” here is again only a lame convenience—it’s just a simplistic way of saying that I suspect my mind is active to an extent that it’s weird. But it’s not any more accurate than calling Shaq’s size a “disorder”—he is certainly weirdly large, but it’s still just a matter of degree—there is nothing fundamentally different about him.

For the analogy to work, I’ve got to make at least three assumptions. Feel free to call B.S. on these.

1. My mind is, in fact, weirdly active.
2. Certain “strengths” and “weaknesses” are primarily the result of this weirdly active mind.
3. My weirdly active mind is, like Shaq’s size, in large part inherited and irreversible.

If you’re playing along at home, just replace “weirdly active mind” with whatever you think is weird about you.

To me the least important assumption is the third one. It may be that I am perfectly able to tone down my mental chatter by, say, medicating or meditating (just like Shaq may be able to become less huge by surgery or eating less), but it doesn’t really matter because it comes down to whether I want to keep the weirdness (assuming it exists), whether the things I like about the weirdness sufficiently outweigh the things I don’t. And for me, even when considering what I perceive to be pretty severe “weaknesses” that go along with it, I do like my weirdness. I don’t want it to go away.

(By now you’re probably pretty curious about what I perceive my “weaknesses” to be. I’ve been avoiding specifics just because it’s beside the point, but I will satisfy your curiosity anyway. I perceive these to be fair descriptors of the things I dislike about myself: “awkward” and “distant” and “self-conscious” and “shy” and “reclusive” and “dabbler” and “spacey.” I suspect that these are all pretty closely related to my hyperactive mind, but I won’t get into that here.)

My conclusion, at least until someone or something dismantles my assumptions, is that I’ve got to accept a lot of the things I dislike about myself as constraints. If that’s right, it pisses me off that I’ve spent so much emotional energy on them, but at the same time it feels great to be able to move on, and especially to have some logical guidance about what to move on to.

(Note that this is quite a bit different from advice like “embrace your weaknesses” or “love yourself, weaknesses included,” because that’s, um, dumb. I don’t love some things about myself and that’s not going to change. That’d be every bit as ridiculous as Shaq thinking that his free-throw shooting is just swell.)

But now my emotional energy has switched to a new anxiety. Before it was “how do I suck less so the universe will give me the things I want?” Now it’s “how do I find a lady who will understand and tolerate my suckiness?”