It’s a strange quest, the journey to become super. Strange for those watching and stranger for the person making the journey. The very first thing I felt I needed to do was to evaluate my own strengths and weaknesses, and devise an improvement plan to build upon.
It takes honesty. And I mean both in self-criticism and in avoiding false humility. That latter condition is really important, more than a lot of people might think. After all, I’d say that most people can see their own faults, and in today’s society we are encouraged to obsess over them, in fact. But recognizing strengths? That’s something everyday people are guided to dismiss, to minimize. To disown and ignore. You shouldn’t. I’m not.
So, I sat down in true engineering fashion and started a spreadsheet. I’ve listed my strengths and weaknesses both, and assigned an arbitrary value from 1 to 10, with 10 being the pinnacle of benefit to my goals. In no particular order:
Strengths: Weaknesses:
Diplomacy Physical Strength
Technical Knowledge Attention Span
General Knowledge Not Following Right and Wrong
Sense of Right and Wrong Financial
Doggedness Poor Leadership
Good Leadership
I’ll dig deeper into at least some of these as time goes by, but I wanted to give a flavor of what I see important in my own self-improvement quest. As those factors above go up or down, I adjust the values from week-to-week, and chart them on graphs to give myself some sense of progress I may be making. It’s also important to note that it may be too much to work on all your strengths and weaknesses at the same time, I know I felt it would be so for me. With that in mind, it seemed prudent to me to tackle the weaknesses first, and that’s where I am today. My readers may decide to reverse the emphasis, that is certainly their prerogative.
I urge anyone wanting to follow this path, do it now. Do it with the gusto and deliberation befitting any serious change, as if you are mounting a critical defense. Because you are. There is a storm coming for all of us. It may not be the same storm for us all, but then again, it may yet be. Withstanding it will take grit and purpose, so prepare yourselves. Be a hero.