Manage your weaknesses with boundaries and support while you focus on your strengths.*
Katherine Morgan Scafler
Keep this thought handy when you feel a fit of rage coming on – it isn’t manly to be enraged. Rather, gentleness and civility are more human, and therefore manlier…The nearer a man comes to a calm mind, the closer he is to strength.**
Marcus Aurelius
There are two kinds of strengths and weaknesses.
There are strengths and weaknesses of talent and ability:
Identify what you are good at and develop these–
You have already invested tens of thousands of hours
for them to be so strong.
Perhaps counterintuitively,
You need to identify what you are bad at because
these will rob you of your time, energy, and joy–
Unless you can find a passion for these and are willing to invest
years of practise, they are never going to be a strength.
If you can, stop doing these things,
If you cannot, explore how can you
manage them through your strengths?
There are strengths and weaknesses of character:
We need to work on all of these,
Selflessness, generosity, and wisdom being our goals–
Each orientated towards others, not ourselves.
Humility, gratitude, and faithfulness are always
helpful places to begin.
(Life isn’t simple. What will you add to your plan to further grow in who you are and what you can do?)
*Katherine Morgan Schafler’s The Perfectionist’s Guide to Losing Control;
**Ryan Holiday’s The Daily Stoic.
THIN|SILENCE 