Damage Control

(Inspired from the book: Now Discover Your Strengths by Marcus Buckingham)

DAMAGE CONTROL

The greatest lie ever told. The most generalized phrase ever. All-rounder. Overall personality. Versatility. This general notion that the best man is one who is good in almost every area of life is over-hyped, over-used, and, to be frank, to some extent, stupid. Before I delve into the matter, let me define what I mean by the term. What this means is the general motion that parents and in general society holds for every future person out there, that you should be good in almost everything. You should know karate and cricket. You should do an MBA and Mechanical. This generalized notion that one needs to have a ‘rounded’ personality is what I want to term as damage control. The extra things that you do, that you ‘waste’ your time in, are just like bandages that you try to cover your cracks instead of focusing on your strengths, it’s basic damage control, that is what it is. You try to cover these up so that you won’t be looked down too much, you won’t be judged. The society wants us to be unique and still want everyone to deform or conform in a rounded personality, and not be ‘sharp’.

Instead of focusing on our strengths, we tend to follow damage control, just to try to cover the things that we are fundamentally not good at, and, the failure of which tends us to lead to gloominess and depression. We weep over our weaknesses rather than celebrate our strengths and nurture and develop them. Take the over-used notion, turn your weakness into a strength. This over-the-top notion is simply stupid, based on actual science. When we’re young, like an infant, we have almost infinite neutron connections. Around the age of 10, these infinite neuron connections start decaying exponentially until a few are left. These left-overs are the ones that tend to survive our interactions with the environment, and what we fundamentally get attracted to early in life. This itself is an indication that every one of us is unique and should focus on these fundamentals instead of trying to covering the entire cake, which is literally impossible. Now consider an experiment. Suppose you got an F in algebra, an A in English and an A- in Social Sciences and you go to your parents with that result. How would they react..? A study shows that over 80% of them would appeal to the F in Algebra rather than the A and A- in English and Social Sciences. Now, why is that..? Because we have been fundamentally taught, nurtured in a way to cover our weaknesses, our weak spots instead of trying to find and nurture our strengths. It was beautifully said by Iker Casillas, the legendary Real Madrid goalkeeper, “Like is like goalkeeping. No matter how many saves I make in a match, I am always looked by the goals I concede.” That’s so freaking true.

Our weaknesses are not the only component of our personality, and certainly not the major one. Unless we stop this damage control, this notion of trying to fit in, trying to play your part in life, the script of which is not even written by you and the writers are mediocrity itself, will not stop.

The people and society around you have always tried to make prior decisions on our life. And they’re not entirely wrong, it’s just a matter of perspective. Our previous generation was not privileged with the overload of information and knowledge that we have access to. The global village that all of us are in together has majorly been possible because of the shifting of ideas and stereotypes, courage and the Internet. Our previous generations relied on skill inheritance. Skill inheritance is the primitive and basic genetic idea that the skills that your parents have brewed, nurtured and developed over the years because of their parents should be passed on to you so as to continue the development of their skills, their attributes and, as a result, their communal identity. Skill inheritance has been the fundamental argument of the caste system too. The reason, although considered oppressive and conservative, of the dissent against inter-caste system, has been simply that if another person from another caste marries the person from that caste, the development of the “skill set” can be disturbed and therefore disturb the identity of that community and also the skill that they’ve nurtured over decades. A doctor’s child will become a doctor. A businessman’s child will be an heir to the industry.

However, today, this notion fails on two points. First, as mentioned before, is the information overload and openness that we have access to. This has allowed our generation to search themselves where they fit in and what drives them. This is what we try to label as “passion”. But that still is a little premature to call upon. This word has been so much over-hyped that all of us tend to feel that we are genetically superior or ‘god-gifted’ in at least one skill that we can excel upon and we try to fool ourselves that the reason we haven't found our calling yet is that we haven’t searched much. This is not always the case. Yes, it is true that you need to keep searching, but not for that single calling, but rather you need to introspect yourself and find those fundamental strengths that are in you from the start. You see, generally, there isn’t a single god-gifted ‘skill’ generally, but more likely, a ‘skill-stack’. A ‘skill-stack’ is basically a combination of those fundamental strengths that you can apply to any stream, prior you have knowledge of that stream so that you can judge the alignment of both. This is my second point.

The transition from a single-minded genetically inherited skill set to a more open “skill-stack” which you can fundamentally use in almost every stream that your stack aligns to. TO be unique you need not have a single skill that you have to toil in and out to try and excel in that but, rather, a bunch of skills that you have acquired early on, combining them to stay out of the herd, out of competition and stand unique.

Start celebrating your strengths, develop and nurture them with full discipline into skills and using that combination of those skills, stay unique and out of competition and break that generational skill-set notion. To end with, quoting Denzel Washington, “Your own family will curse you when you’re in the process of breaking all their generational curses. This ain’t for the weak.”