Strengths and Weaknesses
This thought occurred to me several months back when I was supposed to come up with a list of strengths and weaknesses for some of my friends. While the strengths were easily done, writing of the weaknesses resulted in an interesting phenomenon. Every time I wrote a weakness down, after a while of reflection, I will realise that the weakness is no longer a weakness and I will cancel it away. This continued to the case for every of the weaknesses I thought of. I stopped what I was doing and decided to analyse what constitute a strength or weakness, what is their definition. In the end, these were what I come up with...When it refers to ourselves, that is our strengths and weaknesses,
Strengths are traits or abilities which we think we possess that make us a better person than others, something that we are proud to be seen as.
Weaknesses are traits that we feel are hindering us from achieving what we wanted, or certain parts of us that we feel the need to improve on.
When it refers to others, that is when we are pinpointing someone else's strengths and weaknesses,
Strenghts are traits that we are envy of, that we hope to possess too, ablities that we feel that we can learn from.
Weaknesses are the interesting part. First, we have to form an expectation of what we want to see in the other person, what is needed in that person to achieve the things we wanted that person to achieve. Areas that do no meet up to our expectations become their weaknesses instantly, in our view of course. Saying this, who are we to impose our expectations on what the other person should be like, why should the other person be compelled to achieve what we wanted him/her to achieve. We cannot and should not determine the path the other person should take. In fact, the so-called weaknesses in our opinions might turn out to be strengths in achieving what the other person wanted. The weakness might be a pre-requisite for a dominant strength in that person.
Realising this, it no longer make sense to talk about the weaknesses of others.
posted by Ah Loy @ 11:01 AM
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