10 - Freak Factor

For this blog, we read the article "Freak Factor: Discovering Uniqueness by Flaunting Weakness" by David Rendall from the website www.ChangeThis.com. The main theme throughout the article is that people should use their weaknesses to their advantage to figure out what they are good at and figure out what makes them different from everyone else around them. We were then asked to respond to three of the nine listed suggestions and the three I chose are listed below.

4. Forget It: Don't Try To Fix Your Weaknesses
In this suggestion, Rendall suggests that you shouldn't try to fix weaknesses in order to try to grow as a person. He gives four reasons that I agree with to support his point. The two I agree with the most go hand in hang. They state that fixing weaknesses is a slow process and it distracts from activities where we could make more progress. Personally I have seen this happen many times. One example of this in my life is a friend's study habits. He always insisted on using notecards to study but didn't learn well from them. Instead of trying to find a new way to study he kept insisting on trying to make notecards work and ended up wasting even more time than he would have if that effort had been put to trying to find a new way to study.

5. Foundation: Build On Your Strengths
This suggestion sort of goes with the one I mentioned above. In it, Rendall states that "strengths are patterns of passion and proficiency." Your strengths usually come from the things that you love doing and you tend to do well at. I can personally relate to this suggestion too because I have experienced it in my own life. I have always liked listening to things more than I enjoy looking at them. Especially if that thing is a book and reading it is an assignment for a class. It was because of this that I discovered audiobooks and have used them when available to listen to while I read along. I get an entirely different outlook on the book when I hear it in tandem with seeing the words on the page. Rendall says that "you have the greatest potential in your areas of strength" and I couldn't agree more.

6. Focus: You Can't Do Both
This suggestion seems sort of like a summary of both of the two I have talked about above, but I feel that there are added points to this suggestion that make it worth mentioning also. I feel that the support given for this point is very valuable and everyone should take the time to consider it. Rendall says that we have limited resources, and focusing on strengthening both strengths and weaknesses at the same time actually limits progress instead of expediting it. By trying to make both better at the same time, it keeps you from getting really good at any one thing and instead can make you mediocre at a lot of things. Also, since strengths and weaknesses can correspond to eachother, fixing something that is a weakness can actually hurt the strength that it is linked to.

I feel that the combination of these three points are is the most important lesson that Rendall makes in the article. The lesson shows that you won't get better if you try to do everything at once. Instead you need to focus on the things you are good at, get better at them, and use that to your advantage, making you an even more effective person.

In my own journey learning more about the creative process, I have learned a lot about the strengths and weaknesses that I myself have. I have figured out that I am more deadline driven if I am working in a team instead of individually, my ideas usually aren't the best but collaboration with others can allow them to expand and grow, and that being open to change allows you to become more flexible and end up with a better product 99% of the time. I feel like the articles on ChangeThis.com have been very helpful in adding a different view to some aspects of the creative process and they all offer good advice as to things that students can do to try to better their creative careers.