When You're Terrible At Something (But Great At Everything Else)

By sheer virtue of my work I spend my days with high-performing people. I also spend my nights and weekends with one. Back in January it felt like my heart was exploding when I watched my husband, Benjy, lecture at UCLA's Anderson School of Management. For a kid who grew up just a few miles away from Anderson with a coding and sequencing learning disability, it was extraordinary to watch him address a group of Masters in Business Analytics students at this Top 20 Business School. 

Playing it cool, I sat in the back row with a poker face and a notebook (taking notes he'd later ask me for, as I predicted, which is why I took them to give him feedback—even though he had told me he absolutely wasn’t going to ask). When the room clapped at the end of his lecture and the line around him formed, I teared up a little: it was just amazing to watch knowing what he had overcome. Who thought that a kid who couldn't even write a single sentence in the third grade could grow up to write in three spoken languages (English, Hebrew, and Arabic)? Let alone code in three computer languages: R, Python, and html, which he recently learned just to solve a problem at work while quarantined with two kids under four.

At this point you might be thinking: when I clicked here I thought this article was about things you’re bad at, not a feel good piece about a kid who overcame his disability and grew up to be really successful. Yes, his story is incredible, but the disability sticks with him and there’s one thing he’s absolutely terrible at: long-form proofreading. 

The last, lingering effect from his coding and sequencing disability is that he often misses small things in long documents, even with spell-check. They’re the type of little errors that would be blatantly obvious to the average reader. He will tell you himself that he can build you an analytics dashboard but he is incapable of spelling the world “broccoli” correctly. In fact, according to Benjy, part of the reason he has excelled at coding is because, unlike checking for spelling in a long-form document, when you get something wrong while coding you literally can’t miss it, “the whole product is just broken.” 

At his old jobs at places like IBM, Deloitte, or the Department of Defense, that mattered but it didn’t matter that much. Teams were big so there were always lots of eyes on everything. One of the things that attracted him about starting as the very first hire at the data and analytics upstart, 202 Group, this past February was how small and senior the team was going to be. So when his boss asked him to proofread a slide deck they had all been working on and Benjy gave the thumbs up, his boss was reasonably miffed that there were a few errors he had missed.

Nobody likes to mess up at work, especially when you’re still relatively new. If you’re like any of the high-potential and high-performing people I work with, a mistake can easily be confused for failure, and failure can quickly feel existential.   

Odds are that, like Benjy, you are good at 99% of the things you do at work. The truth is that we’re all bad at something in our job. Most of the people I work with try to hide that thing and, because they are such superstar performers, they quietly carry it with them as shame. While Benjy isn’t proud of this or flippant about it, he also isn’t ashamed—something I momentarily forgot about, because it’s exactly the type of thing I would be embarrassed about as a new hire. “So,” I asked him, “What did you tell your boss?”

Here I was thinking I’d have to talk him off the ledge and then I remembered, this was Benjy I was talking to: the chilled out, Southern Californian yin to my energizer-bunny, New Yorker yang. 

“Oh, I just explained to him that this is something I’m terrible at because of my coding and sequencing issues, so I should still play a role in building the deck and presenting it to the clients, but I should never be the final set of eyeballs on it.” His boss’ answer? “No problem, man.”

That moment of open communication saved Benjy from a series of bad slide decks and tough conversations. Instead of spending all his energy on remediation, Benjy had pivoted and focused on optimization. 

For all the talk about “vulnerability” at work and the millions upon millions of Brené Brown books sold, it’s still really hard to talk about our weaknesses at work. Earlier in our careers, we worry that any admission of weakness might derail the next promotion. Later, in positions of leadership, we worry how our team will perceive our flaws. 

At all levels, those “Imposter Syndrome” questions arise like: what if they see I’m not really good enough or I'm labeled as unreliable? And that talk track is destructive. That’s where flaws get mislabeled as failures and those (perceived) failures quickly become existential. Here’s what that downward spiral looks like: typo = unreliable, unreliable = failure, and failure = what am I doing with my life? That’s how quickly—in the blink of an eye—minor flaws like typos become existential for many high performers.  

While the rush to remediation can be tempting, it can actually distract us from optimizing our overall performance. To put it like Marcus Buckingham, a business consultant who grew up at Gallup (designer of the famous Strengthsfinder assessment), “We live in a remedial world [and] you don't remediate your way to excellence.” Explaining in an interview with Adam Grant, “In fact, if you're not really careful, you get people's minds thinking much more about failure prevention than about soaring. No one has ever excelled because they stopped making grammatical errors in their writing.”

Speaking of errors in writing, Benjy hadn’t lectured at Anderson that day because he overcame his issue with long-form proofreading (he’s still bad at that) and it’s certainly not why he got the job he’s currently in. Author’s Note: he did ask me to tell you that he is a great overall writer, even if he still relies on spell-check to get words like “broccoli” and “conditional” right. 

If he had just said sorry and told his boss that he’d be more careful next time, he would have shown himself to be more unreliable. In owning something he was downright terrible at, he actually reinforced his trust, credibility, and reliability—something mission critical on their small team. Importantly, he also redirected his time and energy to other places where he could optimize team outcomes by optimizing his individual performance. 

As Buckingham says, “Our whole message ought to be: you're not broken, but you're not amazing yet. And therefore, the question should be: How can you be amazing?” So here is my challenge to you: think about that thing you’re terrible at and now think about your bigger professional goals. Do you want to remediate or optimize your way to being amazing?

Randi Braun is a coach, consultant, speaker, and the Founder of Something Major. For more on leaning into strengths instead of solving for weakness, read on here. Get in touch with Randi via email or social (below). Copyright 2020. All rights reserved.