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KnownWeaknesses

Page history last edited by Tantek 13 years, 4 months ago

Known Weaknesses

 

Everyone has weaknesses which hold them back, make them vulnerable, and sometimes cause them to fail.

 

The goal of this page is to: recognize, acknowledge, document, analyze, confront, and overcome weaknesses.

 

This project benefits several other projects, perhaps most importantly, ProductivityImprovement, and in particular the reliability of doing datetime dependent GTD items.

 

humor

Even superheroes have weaknesses, so we should not be ashamed that we have them as well. We should only be ashamed if we don't admit to them, and don't work on them.

 

 

purpose

Public documentation serves several purposes.

  • Taking responsibility. Own the problem. Public documentation is an admission of responsibility, self-accountability, a reduction in the chance that you might fall back on blaming external factors for a failure that can be traced back to a personal weakness or other fault.
  • Respecting others. Weaknesses and resulting failures often impact more than just the person who failed. While obviously it is best just to not fail in the first place, and certainly that shows more respect, once you have failed, the only respectful thing you can do is to take responsibility for it. Owning the problem and showing such respect will likely not alleviate the failure, nor even (especially?) the bad feelings associated with it, but may help with at least some degree of understanding and preserve at least some trust.

 

weaknesses

  • punctuality
    • being late for an appointment with a friend (see FriendFeedback) - most recently 2008-08
    • being a little late (5-10min) for a service appointment (e.g. haircut, dentist) - most recently 2008-08
    • being a little late (5-10min) for a professional appointment (e.g. giving a talk) - most recently 2008-08
  • patronizing
    • I said it, but that's essentially what she meant, and when I called it that, she said she was trying to say it nicer - most recently 2010-319.
      • what makes this worse is that I was (am?) apparently behaving that way towards someone I care for/about, and it was "really bothering" her "quite a bit"
    • I can only wonder how much I have been this way towards friends and they've simply quietly blown it off and put up with it as a quirk.
    • How long have I had this weakness?
    • I know that I've been exposed to a lot of it in the past couple of years - did I absorb this weakness?  
  • ...

 

prioritization and filtering

This list is far from comprehensive. I'm prioritizing documenting known weaknesses that affect others. If it's just my own personal stuff, I don't need to burden others with any interim drama/stress (except perhaps vague mentions on blog posts or ephemeral tweets etc.) until I have fully conquered such things and then I can share the path(s) taken to victory.

 

confront

To confront weaknesses, setup future situations similar to past failures, perhaps with a lower level of difficulty than past failures, and attempt them iteratively until you succeed in overcoming that particular weakness at least a couple of times. Then start ramping it up in difficulty level and train yourself to handle more difficult situations which involve or confront your weakness.

  • ...

 

overcome

Document instances of successfully overcoming a weakness as both encouragement to yourself that you can do it, and hopefully to help gain additional trust from those that may have been impacted by past failures from those weaknesses.

  • ...

 


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