In reading the article Freak Factor by David Rendall, I learned a lot about what it means to have a weakness. Everyone has weaknesses, but I know that the term "weakness" can be incredibly subjective. I have noticed that when it comes to creativity, the important thing is not to get down on yourself or analyze what others may think of you, but to instead evaluate yourself, like what really works and what doesn't. For example, others may think that one of my weaknesses is procrastination, but I find that it is a strength. It is a strength because of my ability and preference to work under a time crunch (I'm writing this at midnight the right before it's due...can't you tell?) and my ability to surpress stress. I see my peers turn into a stress ball when they learn of an upcoming project or assignment and feel they have to start doing it right away. This can be great for them, but I have found through experience and success that I really have no need to worry, and that I can manage my time and energy better when it gets down to the wire. This, according to Rendall, would be a strength rather than a weakness.

Rendall gives nine suggestions for self-improvement, all of which I found to be insightful. I found hat I most disagreed with suggestion #4: Forget it, don't try to fix your weakness. This correlated with the suggestion before it, which stated that there is nothing wrong with you. With this I agreed, however, I found the suggestion to not fix or improve your weaknesses to be unproductive. He makes the statement that our weakness will never become a strength, and I definitely agree with this. However, as I stated before, weakness can be a very subjective term, and so it depends on why the weakness matters. As with my earlier example, if one's weakness is procrastination thought it always seems to leave them with late assigments or sloppy work, this is something that undoubtedly should be improved on. Of course you can't work within your weakness, you have to learn from your mistakes and work around it. So a way to fix this would be to evaluate your best working times and measure that with what you are really willing to do. That would end in a happy balance that would likely help you to succeed rather than keep failing.

I very much agreed with #5: Build on your strengths. It is true that if you don't use it you lose it, so one that might take a strength for granted and not appreciate what they have been given, it will start to deteriorate and they will lose it. Broadly speaking, if someone had the strength of an amazing musical ability yet never practiced or expanded their musical knowledge, they would never grow and therefore their ability would diminish because they didn't use what they were given.

I also very much agreed with #7: Find the right spot. It is true that you will never be able to excel at something you don't enjoy doing. It is also true that it is a waste of time to continue to torture yourself with activities you don't enjoy or were forced into. This will never make anybody happy and will only end in extreme amounts of stress. For example, I have never enjoyed going to mass. My mother would always make me go in the hopes that I would one day like it, but I never did. Eventually, I started to make a huge fit about going, and regardless of my protests she would drag me there or otherwise I would be grounded. This stressed her out as much as it made me frustrated. So eventually, we both realized it wasn't getting anywhere and I just stopped going. This allowed her time to enjoy church on her own while causing me a lot less anguish over dreading going. The entire process was entirely unproductive, but now, during the time that I would otherwise be hating my life sitting in church, I can do other things I enjoy.


As I stated earlier, one of my "weaknesses" is procrastination. It is double ended, because on one end it has never really been a problem, and in some circumstances has really helped me out. I work well under pressure, and work sloppily when I have a lot of time. A related weakness is that I don't have a lot of self-discipline, which I have learned is not as important as realizing simply what you enjoy doing versus don't enjoy doing. So, I have come to realize that rather than trying to become better at procrastinating and to start things earlier, I set myself a specific time (usually last minute) to work on something and just do it. This has oftentimes resulted in concentration and on the fly thinking, which is my best strength. However, on the other end is when I realize I have missed out on something that had an earlier deadline that I waited too long to do. For example, I might put off on buying a class book until the day before the exam (because of course I wouldn't study any other time) but the book store had sold out weeks ago. In this regard, I need to learn when it is okay to procrastinate, and what the absolute deadlines are for the things I need to do.