Strengths/Weaknesses

I was off the last two weeks of the year. While I spent a good portion of that time doing absolutely nothing; my wife and I decided to use some of that time to clean our garage.

 
Carrying a toddler while tiptoeing across an icy driveway feels remarkably stupid when you have a massive two stall garage attached to your house. Our garage has been full of random junk ever since our basement flooded in 2021(a story for another day) and hasn't seen a car since. It was time for that to change.

 

So we rolled up our sleeves and started going through junk. We put an endless number of things on our local Buy Nothing group and anything we couldn't find a home for ended up in a 10 foot roll-off dumpster currently sitting in my driveway.

During this exercise, I found a notepad from ~2020 when I was still working at the bank. It was from a time when I knew that banking wasn't going to be a long term gig, and I was trying to come up with an honest assessment of my strengths and weaknesses before going out and looking for something new.

That assessment looked like this:

To save you from having to decipher my chicken scratch - it reads:

What are my strengths?

1. Fast learner, willing to try things with limited experience

2. Problem solver - not afraid to break something to fix it.

3. Free thinker - capable of coming up with out of the box ideas

4. Analytical/Data obsessed - I enjoy digging through available data and am capable of documenting and noticing trends

Weaknesses

1. Easily distracted/Easily bored

2. Non-confrontational

3. generally will seek to do things the easiest/fastest way rather than the best/ideal way

Ideal Career - project/problem solving. Creating systems for optimal progress.

Great at creating systems, terrible at installing/enforcing

As I was reading this, I had to laugh out loud. 

Call it luck, call it destiny, call it manifestation - in 2020, what I described as an ideal career ended up being exactly the job that I have now. When I wrote this note, I don't think I could have told you what a business analyst was, let alone that it was a career I was interested in.

Now it's 2026 and I'm beginning to suspect that being a business analyst isn't quite right for me either. 

So I thought it might be fun to repeat the exercise.

What are my top 3 strengths?

1. Fast Learner
• This one still sits at the top of the list. I am still confident that my willingness and capability to learn and apply new skills on short timelines is unparalleled.
  
  
2. Free Thinker Analytical Thinker
• This one moves up a spot and gets a slight adjustment. I am constantly going down rabbit holes and pulling threads, trying to understand why things are the way they are.
  
  
3. Charismatic Collaborator 
• I'm going to admit this one gives me a bit of ick to write - but I'll allow myself some hubris and claim that I have a reasonably strong knack for getting people to like me and leveraging that into effective collaboration. I think at times I may dive a bit too deep into class clown territory - but it's important to me that people are comfortable with my presence. 
  
  

What are my top 3 weaknesses?

1.  Capacity Management
• I have a habit of over-committing myself to a task or goal, putting in an unsustainable level of effort to complete it, and then using that as confirmation that my capacity was big enough to handle it anyway. This doesn't seem like a weakness until the times that it doesn't work out and all of the balls I'm juggling go flying. 
  
  
2. Non-Committal
• I pride myself on being a generalist and on my ability to learn quickly (see above) - but I'm pretty certain that same trait holds me back from seeing any one thought/dream/plan through to its ends. If you've noticed - even the plan I've talked about on this blog doesn't have a clear end. That's partially because I'm still figuring it out - but I think it's equally because I'm afraid to lock anything in.
  
  
3. Execution 
• I'm really great at thinking, dreaming, and planning. I absolutely suck at executing. This has been true for most of my life - and while I've gotten a bit better over the years, this is still what holds me back most.

Ideal Career - Something where I can tinker with new ideas and am forced to execute them. 

 

Hopefully six years from now, I'll be able to look at this post and laugh at some more accidental prescience. 

As for the garage - we're in the home stretch. (proof that I am capable of execution from time to time)

 Thanks yall

 

CHG