What’s in Your Anti-Wheelhouse?

Welcome to Part II in this series on talent and weakness.

Let’s start with a question: why exactly are your weaknesses a problem?

Probably you have some concrete evidence about why it’s not ideal for you to be bad at numbers or crappy at motivating people or defensive when getting feedback.

But underneath the logical assessment, most of us have a deeper reason to want to root out our weaknesses: they seem to confirm something about us that we really don’t want to be true.

To see what I mean, let’s take my example. One of my weaknesses is that I am not great with fine print or enforcing rules on a granular level. I can miss details that are important, even when I’m trying really fucking hard to pay attention.

For most of my life I did not feel neutral about this weakness. It felt like being a fuck up, someone so inveterately slapdash I could never really be counted on with the important stuff. Whenever I found out about a mistake of this kind that I’d made, I’d feel this stab of shame go through me. Once again, I’d been revealed to be that person, the one I’d been trying so hard to leave behind.

I wanted to master this weakness so that I could finally leave behind Fuck Up Jane once and for all. I tried for years to delete every sign of her presence. But I never came close—because the destination I was aiming for was by definition unreachable. What I wanted wasn’t to be better marginally at handling important details. What I wanted was to be reborn as someone who could keep track of that kind of stuff in the same seemingly natural, near-flawless way as other people I knew. I wanted to handle the fine print of work with the same kind of ease I can bring to things like addressing student morale or identifying an inefficient workflow.

To be clear, this is not a humblebrag about how I’m actually good at the important stuff. Fine print is not unimportant. It is often everything. You can miss a letter of recommendation deadline by five minutes and screw up someone’s entire career. Plus, these categories of skill are not mutually exclusive. Some of the most brilliant, visionary colleagues I’ve worked with have also been able to call up the minutiae of a degree-credit structure on a dime. I once knew a senior academic who was extremely famous for his philosophical musings and also so good at catching small errors I secretly nicknamed him The Niggler. For some people, a natural affinity for niggling can be combined with the most powerful big-picture thinking.

The point is, I am not one of those people. And for the longest time, I could not imagine just admitting and living with that fact.

Instead, I was determined to root out the taint of fuck-up-ery. I wanted to beat my weakness—and that effort made everything worse. I was defensive and touchy about anything that suggested an error of this type, because I didn’t want to have to be ashamed. When I had to face the fact that I screwed up, I found it hard to own up and fix things, because the mistake was so charged with terrible feelings I didn’t want to engage` with the aftermath. To compensate for how bad I felt about still being this way, I let myself feel resentful and borderline disdainful for people who were good with small print—hence the name The Niggler.

I realised none of this at the time, of course. I was just trying to qualify for an exit visa from Shame Land, which I thought required becoming a person without discernible flaws.

But once I put down the Become Flawless project, my entire orientation to the issue shifted. I thought welp, I guess fine print is just not going to be my wheelhouse—and my ability to handle the situations caused by this weakness improved dramatically. When I owned that I didn’t excel in this area and didn’t feel ashamed of the fact, I no longer had any urge to argue about whose fault it was or insist it wasn’t my problem. I didn’t avoid mistakes or hope they would just go away. I could accept when I screwed up, apologise when it caused problems or extra work for other people, and find a way to make it right, so they didn’t have to compensate for my mistakes.

I was also startled to discover that there’s a big difference between trying to eradicate a weakness and actually addressing it. When I was just trying to escape being a fuck up, I wanted to become someone never had this problem in the first place—which didn’t give me much room to think about how best to manage my lack of ability. But once I accepted that fine print and granular compliance were not going to become intuitive to me, it was as if my problem-solving brain suddenly decided to wake up and weigh in. I started to get curious about what exactly was happening when I missed details. I came up with workarounds, without expecting them to be flawless. I could function a bit better in relation to my weakness—and I could live with that imperfect result—because I could now own the fact that not everything was going to be in my wheelhouse.

One of the most surprising things about this shift, though, is how grown up it feels to own our anti-wheelhouse areas. It feels like being an equal, instead of someone who has to skulk around trying to hide their shameful flaw and trying not to get in trouble. Instead of dividing the world into people who do and don’t have to be ashamed, we can all just be humans trying our best, each of us bringing our own singular mixture of strengths and weaknesses to the table. We can also be more generous with other people when they show their own dark sides, which also feels like a more adult place to be. When we aren’t keeping score on our own attempt to be flawless, we seem to lose a lot of the desire to worry about the scores of others, even when they seem out of our league.

Now, when I think about people like The Niggler who seem to be able to do it all, I feel less need to judge myself against them. I don’t assume they have no weaknesses, because I know that’s not a thing. I just assume their anti-wheelhouse resides somewhere that isn’t visible to me. But even if someone else’s weaknesses are demonstrably less significant than our own, so fucking what? It changes nothing about the benefits we get when we own what does and doesn’t come easy to us.

Ultimately, the sooner we can accept that we might just not be good at certain things, the faster we get out of Shame Land—and, ironically, the better we get at managing the areas where we don’t find it easy to perform. That means we get to reclaim all that energy that went into trying to escape our weaknesses and direct it to the sweet spot where our best work can emerge. It turns out that being in your wheelhouse feels so much more powerful and expansive and free when you know that it’s OK for there to be an outside of it too.

Attention, lovely readers! I am planning a third and final instalment to this series and would love to hear your thoughts, comments and questions so I respond to them. To let me know, reply or leave a comment. –J.