I’m not good at that

This week I was talking to a client I’ll call Jasmīna about what she saw as her worst traits. Among other things, she believed she sucked at group dynamics, failed to listen enough to others, and tended to freeze in high-input situations. She was ashamed of being oblivious, disengaged and slow to respond, which she saw as compounding to make her weird and borderline selfish. The only solution seemed to her to be to improve in these areas, to become as good at reading social cues and reacting on the fly as she is at the impressive work she is doing in her PhD.

This is the approach that most of my clients take to their weaknesses, and it’s one that I used to take to my own too. It’s an approach that acknowledges our skills (at least a bit) but is mostly focused on bringing the rest of our behaviour up to scratch. In this view, it’s self-evident that our weaknesses are there to be fixed.

I now have a very different view of talent, strengths and weaknesses, and I want my clients to have a chance to consider this alternative. So I asked Jasmīna, “What would you have to sacrifice in these social situations if you went all in on prioritizing responding to social cues, paying close attention in groups and reacting on the fly?”

She reflected for a moment, then said in her accented English, “My deep thinking. My way to stand back and see what is going on under the surface. The patterns I map out. I am remote because all of that is going on in my head.”

I nodded. “What if you just decided tuning into social cues and quick thinking are not your wheelhouse?” I offered. “The world needs people who can read people’s reactions and make fast decisions in a crisis. But it also needs people who can sit quietly in a room and map out why the crisis happened in the first place.”

“I am good at being this second person,” she admitted.

There was a moment of silence. Then I asked, “What do you think would change in your life if you just concentrated on being that second person and stopped worrying about being the other kind?”

“This would be a relief,” she said. “I could do many things.” Then, showing her ability to get right to the heart of the matter, she continued, “But why is it OK to just do this?”

By which she meant: why is it OK not to meet social expectations, to behave in a way others sometimes find rude or confusing, to let herself react slowly and process in quiet, without self-recrimination? Why is it OK to let her weaknesses be?

One of the most common answers to this type of question in recent years is one that has likely already occurred to you: because of neurodiversity. That answer might seem especially applicable if, like Jasmīna, the person in question struggles with things like social cues and is extremely skilled at abstract thinking.

But I think this answer, whether or not it’s accurate in this case, also reveals something about how strong the demand to fix every weakness has become.

To be crystal clear, I’m not intending to argue with anyone’s diagnosis. My point is not that being neurodivergent is a bad reason to drop certain expectations of ourselves or others.

My point is rather that as a culture we now seem to find it difficult to question these expectations outside the realm of neurodivergence. It’s as if we believe we are all on the hook for meeting every possible expectation for our performance and behaviour, unless we can show a certified letter of exemption from a psychiatrist.

We don’t seem to have much space left to embrace weaknesses as a normal part of human personality and variation. And we definitely don’t seem to have much space to learn from our weaknesses—to let them illuminate where we’re strongest—instead of reacting with shame and a determination to fix ourselves.

This is particularly a problem for smart, talented people like my client Jasmīna and readers of this newsletter, because exceptional talent requires a sacrifice that is inconceivable within this kind of fix-it-all culture.

It’s a sacrifice of our desire to meet all expectations—our often unstated but overriding goal of jumping through every conceivable hoop while never fucking up a single meaningful thing.

Unless we are willing to sacrifice this goal and stop focusing on fixing our every weakness, we won’t get full access to what I call our talent fingerprint—each person’s unique sweet spot where intelligence, skills, curiosity, dedication and desire overlap.

It takes focus and energy and determination to activate that sweet spot fully, especially if you are dealing with internal resistance. To unlock our talents at a high level is hard enough, even when we’re not spending half our time worrying about what we don’t automatically do well. If we want to find out what we can really do, we have to be willing to let go of desire to do everything right.

We have to be able to say about some things, I’m not good at that. And then just move the fuck on.

That tradeoff is what my question to Jasmīna was intended to surface. It’s not that she can’t move the needle on her behaviour in social situations or that it’s bad to want to. It’s that fully developing her capacity to be the person who finds the deep patterns requires letting herself just fucking be that person.

It requires spending more time finding out what that version of herself can do and less time worrying about the ways she doesn’t meet every possible bar for social and personal competence.

Each of us has to decide for ourselves if that tradeoff is worth it. And everyone’s tradeoff looks different. For some people, their wheelhouse is right smack in the middle of the most raucous party. But I don’t think we find out how powerful we can be in our wheelhouse, wherever that is, until we’re willing to let what is outside of it go.

Letting go of fixing your weaknesses doesn’t have to mean being lazy, disorganised or an asshole. In fact, making peace with your weaknesses can make being focused, organised and kind a hell of a lot easier.

It turns out that once you can embrace something as a weakness and take ownership of it—rather than shaming and fighting yourself to fix it—you can come at the entire situation with a lot more ingenuity and grace.

In the rest of this series, I’ll break down why that’s the case, via my own decidedly non-wheelhouse struggles with some parts of my professor job. I’ll also show why the focus on weaknesses saps not only our time and energy but also a kind of authority we need if we’re to access our talents fully. And I’ll share some stories about what it looks like when you let go of what is outside your wheelhouse and lean into your talent fingerprint instead.

See you next week.