Freak Factor

The article “Freak Factor”, by David Rendall discusses how people’s peoples strengths and weaknesses and how they effect a persons success in life. He writes than many people attempt to both build on their strengths as well as work on their weaknesses. Rendall believes that this waste too much energy, in that in the end it has very little success. He argues that instead people should realize that weaknesses are apart of everyone and that they accentuate our strengths. Additionally, he writes that we should focus only on bettering our strengths rather than worrying about hard to fix weaknesses.

            I find this an interesting take on ways to better oneself. For most of my life I have heard that being well rounded is key, and that working on weaknesses is an important part of life. I’m not sure if I completely agree with the author because I feel that working on weaknesses can be successful and make people more well rounded. However, I do like a couple of things that he writes about, most notably the sections Flawless, Foundation, and Putting your Quirks to Work.

I enjoyed the section Flawless because I like Rendall’s take on how people’s weakness don’t make them flawed. He writes that everybody has there own set of strengths and weaknesses, and that each strength is connected to its own weakness. I thought that his list strengths and their comparative weaknesses was very insightful, and I see both of this in myself. I think that people should start to see weaknesses in a way such as this. Nobody can be perfect, and the chemistry of our brains only allow for so many strengths. For example, I can’t think of many creative people that I know who are organized. Even now as I look around my room there is shit everywhere, I know where nothing is, and I just cleaned. However, one thing I disagree with the author on is that I should work to make my self more organized. If not just to have my room look presentable to friends.

A second part of this article that I liked was section five, Foundation. I think that people are happier when they are doing things they love, and usually people love doing what they’re good at. This is the same principle that the author is getting at in this section of the article. He writes that people have the greatest potential for success in their strengths (duh), and that building on these strengths gives people the ability to become great at something. Additionally he writes that sometimes strengths can make up for ones weaknesses. Lets go back to the creative vs. disorganized issue. It may piss people off that your office looks like shit, but if you always have great ideas that make the company money, I think they might forgive you.

A final section of this article that I liked was Putting your Quirks to Work. He writes that we sometimes exhaust ourselves doing things that we aren’t very good at, and that this gives us less energy to do stuff that we excel in. For example, why would I waste my time trying to figure out the next big formula for math or physics? I at suck at math and I hate it, so it would be just a waste of time. I’m not to bad at making music so why wouldn’t I spend more time becoming great at that. Additionally, he writes that we should all find the freak in others. I really enjoy this idea because I think that’s what makes life interesting. If we all had the same strengths and weaknesses life would suck. I love finding people who have quirks and do interesting things because it throws a twist into life.