Great post jac. 1, 2, 3, and 5 sound perfect answers for the "What is your biggest weakness" interview question.
> I was raised in an environment where almost everybody simply spoke the truth.
I'm the opposite. I was born and brought up in India and went to a boarding school at age 10. I will give people the benefit of the doubt initially but I will not fully trust them till they've proven themselves, usually by their actions not words.
> 3) I either delegate too much or too little
Proper delegation is easy when all you have are managerial/people-skills. You delegate to the best coders, artists, and accountants that you can afford. But when you consider yourself as a viable candidate for a task that can be delegated, you end up with the "I should have done it myself" half the times. On the other hand, a manager with no-tech/domain-specific skills would think "I should have picked a better person." Over time, the manager gets better and better at finding the right people to delegate the task to, whereas you don't. Meanwhile, you get more and more prone to either doing it yourself completely or not doing it at all and completely relying on someone to do it all.
My advice to anyone who fits this bill (as do I), next time you think "I should have done it myself", stop yourself and instead ask "What could I have done differently to help someone finish this task better?"
<i>I'm the opposite. I was born and brought up in India...</i>
Lest anyone draw any unwarranted inferences here, it's not impossible in India to have an environment where everyone simply speaks the truth. I have myself as an example. Grew up and was educated in an environment of complete meritocracy and honesty and only beyond my teenage years, realized how the real world works.
* My advice to anyone who fits this bill (as do I), next time you think "I should have done it myself", stop yourself and instead ask "What could I have done differently to help someone finish this task better?" *
Thanks for the advice. I'm struggling with delegating work and I find it hard to take a step back and look at it from that point of view instead of just complaining that I could have done a better work (when actually I couldn't have done a better work because I didn't have time hence the delegating).
Only very few people have all the necessary skills to successfully build a business from the ground up and grow it, and that's OK, really.
In this case Jacques has a few character traits that are real liabilities. So it's easy for us to laugh from the sidelines... knowing that we would never make those mistakes ourselves... (oh, the naivete) but we're all making critical mistakes, and only very few of us are introspective enough to realize what our real weak points are. (We tend to dismiss those things we're bad at as unimportant and we overestimate how introspective we are compared to other people. I'm no exception).
It wouldn't surprise me if the mistakes Jacques has listed are pretty inconsequential in the big picture. Sure, it only takes one big mistake to kill a project, but in the course of 24 years everybody is going to make so many mistakes that it becomes easy to lose the forest for the trees.
Too gullible? That's not the end of the world. Everybody gets burned occasionally. Well, almost everybody. People who never get burned tend to be pessimists who never see opportunities, even when they're looking right at them! Maybe in this case there is a different problem, such as "doesn't make contingency plans" or "too impulsive". Even if you trust everybody completely you can still become hugely successful in 24 years. I suspect "gullibility" is only on the list because you feel like a fool when you get taken advantage of, not because you've been consistently cheated in the past 24 years. I also suspect that if you had become hugely successful you wouldn't feel so bad anymore about trusting the wrong people.
Or take "seeing potential in people, not reality". Perhaps in combination of the above this can be simply summarized as "bad judge of character", if that's not too harsh. Other things hint at this as well "surprised when other people zone out", "surprised when people burn out", etc. Or maybe you do see the reality in people, the "spark" as it were, but perhaps you just don't have the reality distortion field to turn those people into passionate followers.
Anyway, I admire the way you've described some of your mistakes, but I don't believe, not for a second, that these mistakes are actually what have kept you from getting the success you want.
Funny, I think I've actually been quite successful, possibly much more than what I ever deserved, but I always wonder what the road behind me would have looked like if not for these things and I'm ok with making mistakes as long as I learn something from them.
This is just one attempt of many at analyzing and learning from past issues.
Think of it as a single step in a 70 year project of self improvement.
So it's easy for us to laugh from the sidelines... knowing that we would never make those mistakes ourselves... (oh, the naivete) but we're all making critical mistakes, and only very few of us are introspective enough to realize what our real weak points are.
A lot of these mistakes sound exactly like ones I would make, particularly #1-2.
People, in general, tend to be pessimistic and overly wary of "strangers" but overtrusting of individuals. The same syndrome is seen in politics, where people have a negative view of "politicians" but think highly of their own representatives-- this is why incumbents have such a major advantage.
One irony is that people who have great character tend often to be poor judges of others' character, because they don't have the "spider sense" that indicates a sketchy character. If you're like this (and a lot of people are) you need to find the rare people who have good character but who are able to detect bad character in others, and ask for their opinions of someone before trusting that person with too much.
To echo your comment about the DNA testing kit, be careful about uploading a structured analysis of your personal weaknesses to a medium that forgets nothing... People might use this against you (by exploiting your weaknesses) in the future.
Good point, and thanks for the warning, I really appreciated it, and I'll keep it in mind.
Those that would use this against me though will find that over time I've changed, bit by bit, and I'm confident enough about these things now that I dare to commit them to writing as a permanent reminder to myself and to others that personal improvement never ends.
And for every person that intends to abuse this there will hopefully be more than one that will either benefit from it indirectly because they can avoid some pitfall elsewhere or because they will know better what my weaknesses are when dealing with me in a positive way.
Agreed. I made the same decision/trade-off analysis when I posted my articles about "Hyperbrains" on http://inter-sections.net .. and was sternly warned about it by my father!... and had to admit he had a point too.
I can see where you are coming from. Recently we let go of someone and the person complained about my weaknesses. I said "that's why I hired you, remember?". I tend to be ruthlessly blunt about my weaknesses.
This is a wonderful exercise. Everyone has hamartia [1] ... the "fatal flaw" and you would greatly benefit from figuring out what it is and staying mindful of how it can mess things up for you.
It can be hard to see this in yourself. Ask people you trust to be honest and who know you well to help you evaluate your weakness(es)
I have to work really very hard to overcome this tendency and I'm pretty sure that it has cost me over the years to find little or no interest in doing the 'grunt' work of running a business.
This is my biggest problem. I am interested building things or attempting to do things that I am not sure that I am capable of. The moment I finish building or even recognize how to do so, I lose interest. It's not great.
Be careful you are not too hard on yourself. There is a difference between having a personality trait "I tend to believe what people say as being true" and making a mistake "I believed that salesman really owned the Brooklyn Bridge!"
Same goes for the rest of them. In fact, most of these are actually strengths -- as long as you temper them with experience. I especially liked knowing how to do too much and not being able to stay out of the kitchen, as I am terrible about that myself.
The one about short attention spans is a good one also because
> I was raised in an environment where almost everybody simply spoke the truth.
I'm the opposite. I was born and brought up in India and went to a boarding school at age 10. I will give people the benefit of the doubt initially but I will not fully trust them till they've proven themselves, usually by their actions not words.
> 3) I either delegate too much or too little
Proper delegation is easy when all you have are managerial/people-skills. You delegate to the best coders, artists, and accountants that you can afford. But when you consider yourself as a viable candidate for a task that can be delegated, you end up with the "I should have done it myself" half the times. On the other hand, a manager with no-tech/domain-specific skills would think "I should have picked a better person." Over time, the manager gets better and better at finding the right people to delegate the task to, whereas you don't. Meanwhile, you get more and more prone to either doing it yourself completely or not doing it at all and completely relying on someone to do it all.
My advice to anyone who fits this bill (as do I), next time you think "I should have done it myself", stop yourself and instead ask "What could I have done differently to help someone finish this task better?"