First read this:
David Rendall's Freak Factor
What you just read was David Rendall’s “Freak Factor: Discovering Uniqueness by Flaunting Weakness”. Basically within this short, self-motivational reading Rendall explains how everyone has strengths and weaknesses; it is only natural. He also expresses his theories on how strengths and weaknesses are directly related and how he thinks they must be balanced. I think that Rendall definitely is onto something, for starters, he lists out a bunch of strengths and weaknesses that he claims are directly correlated and he seems to be right on target. He links creativity with disorganization, organization with inflexibility, and flexibility with inconsistency; all of these characteristics often seem to coincide, and I’m sure I’m not the only one that agrees. Throughout the reading you notice one continuous pattern of Rendall telling the reader NOT to concentrate on their weaknesses and to focus on their strengths; if they do the opposite, they will balance out the weaknesses and the strengths to be just one giant ball of mediocre flesh that doesn’t really stand out in any good or bad fashion. I really liked the metaphor that Rendall used to portray what he meant by using K-Mart, Target, and Wal-Mart as his examples of different people have different strengths (Target has quality, Wal-Mart has low price), and those that don’t accept their weaknesses end up developing only weaknesses, e.g. K-Mart, the company that shot for quality and low price, just met customer expectations half way and went bankrupt. I thought that was a very accurate and interesting analogy. Now I will go over three of these nine suggestions Rendall gives the reader that I personally enjoy and heavily agree with.
I really like his second suggestion. He basically lists out all of the flaws that he’s ever been called out on by his wife, his kids, his co-workers, his friends, his neighbors, and anyone he’s ever met; he then takes all of these flaws and turns them into positive qualities. He said, “his apparent flaws were clues to his true strengths.” With this positive outlook, Rendall became the powerful, successful, unique man that he is today: a professor, speaker, and consultant. No longer would someone who is known as the hyperactive guy have to be the hyperactive guy, now he gets paid to stand up and talk. I like how he simply says the guy who can’t work in teams simply works alone. Some people force others who already work well alone to work in teams and sometimes it can hinder their work. This isn’t at all a stab at the class I enjoyed working in teams. Hahaha. I pretty much like this suggestion because I personally typically like to remain positive regardless of how bad the situation, and he turns weaknesses with a negative connotation into strengths with a positive sound to them.
Next I enjoy his suggestion to build on one’s strengths. This also includes accepting one’s weaknesses. The fifth suggestion talks about foundation and focusing on improving yourself by increasing what you’re already good at. One of the best points he makes in this paragraph is “It feels good. It is enjoyable and energizing to work on your strengths,” and he’s right. What’s the point in doing something you don’t like? When you don’t like what you’re doing not only are you hindering your happiness, your improvement rate slows to a crawl, and you neglect and perhaps even weaken your strengths. Someone whose good at football shouldn’t go spend all of their time trying to improve their terrible skills on the piano because eventually they will have learned very little on the piano and lost a great deal of strength and muscle memory that helped them be so good at football.
Finally, I like the third suggestion: Flawless, There’s Nothing Wrong With You. This is the section where Rendall goes over the linked strengths and weaknesses: creativity comes with disorganization; organization comes with inflexibility; self-confidence comes with arrogance, and so on. All of these are very accurate, I’m sure that anyone that reads any of these qualities can either relate by evaluating himself or herself or someone they know. No one has every quality, there must be balance, and in order for there to be balance, we all must have some flaw.
What have I found my strengths and weaknesses to be pertaining to the creative process? I don’t really know what you mean by the creative process. I know that I’m confident, so naturally people think that I’m arrogant even though I try to portray myself has humble. But inside I am confident, and it helps me get by. I am always positive. I like to tell people that if they’re not positive, things that happen to them will more than likely be not positive, but because this is how I am it also makes me kind of unrealistic, but I think it pays off. I’m also told that I’m creative and I like to think that I am. Something that reinforces this is this article and how disorganized I am. My desk looks like an explosion and the icons in my computer are meshed together in one giant mess. This is a problem though because when you’re in film, well at least this quarter I’m taking 419 working on a thirty-minute short film as a digital imaging technician, which basically revolves around being 100% organized. Ironically, some things within the creative world require major organization, if I mess up the organization of the files even slightly, I’ll probably get reamed for it.
Conclusive paragraph.
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