My Biggest Weakness

Professional Overthinker

Early in my professional career, there was a memorable time where my boss accused me of overthinking a project. This bothered me, because at the time I believed thoughtfulness to be a virtue of the highest regard. As I lamented this situation to my wife, I further explained:

“And he’s objectively incorrect! I’m not overthinking this. I looked up the definition of overthinking, and when you map it to the particulars of how I’m providing input here, it doesn’t match at all!”

My wife (rightfully so) laughed me out of the room. She keeps me humble and self aware like that.

I’ve been told I have a philosopher’s temperament, and for better or worse, I have an ingrained inability to understand anything exclusively shallowly – in many ways, I can’t understand anything at all until I’ve mapped it onto the internal network of my understanding of base reality.

This is my greatest strength, what I consistently bring to the table in a project; my top 5 strengths last time I took the Clifton Strengthfinder’s assessment were Learner, Input, Intellection, Deliberative, and Relator. The first two mean I collect skills, ideas, and knowledge; the second two mean I like thinking and need to think very deeply; and the fifth one (my only relationship building strength in my top five) means that I gravitate towards deep relationships and away from shallow conversation: I prefer quality over quantity in all things, and I need things to connect.

This temperament of depth, as it turns out, is also my greatest weakness: I am the brakes in the process, the ready and aim before the fire, the one who can sometimes see only forest and miss the trees. In other words, in a world that increasingly desires instant gratification, immediate results, and quality over quantity, I am often the one insisting on gumming up the works for the sake of thinking things through.

And it’s true, this default mode of mine is often to my detriment: I am often stuck in analysis paralysis, I miss opportunities from hesitation, and I sometimes unnecessarily slow down projects from my need to understand the bigger picture. When I’m faced with tough decisions that need to be made right away, my first instinct is to freeze up.

So am I posting an article about my biggest weakness for anyone on the internet to read?

What I’ve Discovered

Through all my reading and deep overthinking across a plethora of subjects, I’ve discovered what I believe to be the single most effective strategy one can have as a brand or as an individual professional:

Authenticity to the point of vulnerability.

Being so authentic and true to your self that everyone knows your strengths and your biggest weaknesses. Your biggest wins and most crushing failures. This stance forces you to align with reality as best you can, to never fight against it.

If you believe truth wins over falsehoods (which I do) the only way to live that out is to acknowledge the inconvenient truths, the uncomfortable realities, the undesirable facts – especially the ones that are within your control to change.

To attempt to hide your weaknesses, even through simple omission, is to declare war on reality and choose to work around it instead of within it. That is a war you will eventually lose. Every time.