It has been a while since I have been tagged in a chainpost but Brent Ozar tagged me the other day. As soon as I read the question my first response was “my biggest weakness is responding to these chainposts”. That’s when I realized my biggest weakness is that I am an asshole curmudgeon but Suzanne says that is a personality trait and I need to think of something else otherwise I may break this chain and no one wants that.
This was a hard post to write. Not because I could not think of a weakness, but because I could not point out any one weakness as my “biggest”. And what is meant by “biggest”? Isn’t size relative? And I have always been told that size doesn’t matter. Was I being lied to all these years?
Anyway, back to the post. I tried to apply some root cause analysis to as many of my weaknesses as possible. For each weakness I identified I would first ask if it was a personality trait. If not, then I would check to see if it was the result of a childhood experience (or, say, trauma). Then it would be a quick check to see if the identified weakness is actually a strength (which is impossible, really) followed by a check to see if the weakness is simply a result of my being distracted or bored.
By far the majority of my weaknesses are attributed to the fact that I always think I can do everything.
At the end of my Senior year in High School we were having the awards banquet for the Spring sports. I was on the varsity baseball team which is my way of saying I was on the bench most of the year. And with good reason, I could never bat my weight. But I was always very confident in my ability to play the field. I was always thinking to myself “what will I do if the ball is hit to me”, which is a great way to make certain you know exactly what to do when the ball arrives. You can also change where you are standing depending on the count and the expected pitch; moving five feet right or left can be the difference between a routine catch and a diving stab.
During the banquet I was called up and given an extra large helmet. This thing was huge, XXXL size, I had never seen it before and don’t know were the coach found it. But he gave it to me an explained to everyone why. “It’s for his head, because all season long while sitting on the bench whenever a ball was hit that landed in play Tom would say ‘I could have gotten that one'”. As soon as he said those words I immediately thought of a handful of times when I did say exactly that, but most of the time it was just a joke. Still, we all had a good laugh that night but I always think back to that moment because that is when I realized that (1) I do think I can get to the ball and (2) not everyone wants to hear what I think.
Maybe it is because I am the youngest of four children and that I am always trying to show others that I can do the same things they can do. I don’t know, really. But to this very day I have confidence in my abilities and confidence in my future abilities as well. I once had a close friend who seemed rather put off by my attitude that good things were going to happen to me in my lifetime. She could not understand why I felt that way about myself. Well, if I don’t have confidence in me, who will?
But having such confidence became a root cause for other weaknesses. For example, I think I can do everything. All the time. And all at once. I have been spreading myself too thin for most of my adult life. It has been rare for me to only have one thing to focus on at a time. I am often involved deeply in three or four projects at a time. And when I get spread too thin then all of my work suffers. Most people function best when allowed to focus on no more than two tasks at the same time, and yet I overload myself with up to a dozen items at once.
And I think this confidence has also made me very competitive. Very. I hate losing, but I am not a poor loser. I’ll just make you play again until I win at least once. This competitive nature can cause me to butt heads, especially in the IT world, but I am getting better at dealing with those emotions.
And in a weird twist, this confidence and competitiveness also means that I get an inferiority complex and so I spend a lot of time trying to learn more and more about everything I can so that I can hold my own against anyone else. In anything. It doesn’t matter what, I want to learn as much as possible about it so that I can use that knowledge to make the right decisions at the right time. Some people will call that experience. I call it preparation for the right opportunity. But it means that I end up spending far too much extra time in front of a computer even when I am not in the office.
Which means that, as a result of my thinking I can do everything, I am not spending enough time with my family, which is the most important thing I should be doing. No question that this weakness is having the largest impact possible both inside and outside the office.
I have lost track of who has been tagged so far, so I will tag Colin Stasiuk (@BenchmarkIT), Jorge Segarra (@SQLChicken), and Ken Simmons (@kensimmons).
