substantive weaknesses

temporary genuine personal limitations

Substantive weaknesses are hard to talk about in public, so we invented safe ones to exist, to protect us from judgment. I work too hard. I care too much. I am not too sociable. I talk too much. I don’t like x. I don’t like y. Light, escapable, superficial points that don’t reveal anything specific, personal, vulnerable, real.

Nobody is really to blame, I guess.

The mind helps us avoid the overwhelming reality that, if we really wanted to uncover the lid, there are dozens of weaknesses we could at any time improve upon. It prefers to keep a fun, at times falsely detached, approach to it all, ”don’t let me get started, or I’ll have to talk about it until tomorrow!”. At times, a defensive, protective, serious one, ”we’re all humans, let’s not be hard on ourselves”. At times, an overly-obsessed, singular-vision, downstream vertically-simplified one, “I can’t do anything”. Other times a more cloudy, fuzzy, undefined fog of particles, each being a point, but hard to actually list and make it discrete.

We stand on this slippery superposition, simultaneously aware, simultaneously unable to grasp.

When we get the chance to unroll the truth, we drive into tricky territories. During job interviews, where do you draw the line? How can you be real enough, and show you know your deal to improve, without opening the tiniest possibility that you might be giving the impression that, well, your weaknesses don’t make you suited for the role?

A perfect overlap and alignment of incentives exists. An alignment where one part really cares about the upside of the person, while truly being invested in improving their genuine personal limitations, together with the other part, an emotionally safe, grounded person, with plenty of opportunities, fully real and transparent about finding the perfect combo for both parties. It’s called a combo and not a unilateral advantageous agreement for a reason, after all.

This perfect overlap and alignment of incentives exists, it just doesn’t happen most of the time.

To be fair, semantics doesn’t help.

Maybe it’s just me, but when I use the word “weakness”, I think about something structural. I wouldn’t say fundamental, but something so within me that it’s pretty much very sticky. But when I use “things I want to improve about myself”, I relax and can comfortably open up and talk in plain language.
On top of that, I also have the sense that weaknesses are inwardly nuanced and outwardly static. Someone saying they have a hard time receiving feedback not in a personal way, could mean that, of course, they know that the feedback is useful and is purely applied to the professional topic in discussion, but it takes them ten minutes to properly calm down that part of themselves that’s triggered and thinks they are unworthy of love. But a person hearing the simplified version from the outside could default into thinking that this person can’t receive feedback, or they will start screaming like a baby and monkey jumping around the room.

Or maybe it’s just me who overthinks this, I don’t know.

I am having rounds of interviews these days, and got the following beautiful feedback: “We’ve noticed that it required significant prompting to move past safe weaknesses to find more actionable development areas. We’d encourage you to deepen your self-reflection practice to identify specific growth areas that directly impact your effectiveness as a builder”.

To anyone reading my essays, this could come as a surprise, it did to me. But reflecting and writing over months of time is a different sport compared to compacting that knowledge and delivering it in a tidy, structured, professional-oriented package, conveyable and digestible in a few minutes.

So I made it, a list of genuine personal limitations that affect my effectiveness in meaningful ways (not optimised to be digestible in a few minutes):

• I often default in emotionally assuming that things take way longer than expected on small to medium deliverables. If something objectively takes around twenty minutes, a part of my mind needs an hour allocated time to even sit down and start. This applies especially to things I am afraid to work on, because they are hard or because I am afraid of not being prepared enough, or to things I have had to complete for a long time (and so I inflate the time needed, because I really want to complete it, but this totally backfires). “Just do it” kind of thinking obviously helps, cause by definition it is the thing, I just need to be in a safe state of mind to remember that (if I am rushing through things, I’ll often find myself rushing through useless stuff). The best tool to date has been to do small things (emptying my WhatsApp inbox) during dead times (in line at the supermarket). This trains my mind that I can just do small things quickly, which starts a virtuous cycle that can spread to more meaningful things.

• It’s hard for me to avoid opening new threads in life, instead of keeping those four or five and getting them to completion before starting again. To clarify, a thread is “something I am doing in life”, from small things like this essay to bigger ones, like raising a fund. Underneath it, there is a certain fear of those threads not being worthy or not leading me anywhere (which I am aware to be a vicious cycle, because it can become a self-inflicted prophecy), so I have a tendency to spread myself across to unconsciously hedge my bets. I’ve made huge progress on this, aided by finding things that I’d do regardless of their success (this blog, coaching, helping talents), but a lot to unlock. A thing that has helped was to fully commit to completing the work, meaning that even when the work sucks (or seems to be the worst next step ever, to be contextualised), I’d complete it regardless. This has beautiful byproducts. The first is that you actually get things done, and you realise how much of what sucked was just fear in disguise. The second is self-reinforcement learning: the realisation that the thing could have been done way quicker, if you had only a few other threads open, is smashed in front of your face.

• Related to this, I am not as aggressive, resolute, and unwavering as I could be on the creations I want to bring into existence. I many times miss the laser focus to go from A to B in its shortest path possible, resulting in a safe, soft approach. It helps a lot to stay with people who have that internalised that fire and drive, which is maybe the main reason for me in looking for a team to join or committing to travel to SF multiple times a year. I have that fire in me, but it’s easier to grow it in a hot room.

• Related to this, I have so much to learn about achieving a sustainable, steady, high-intensity way of being. A lot in the last year was lived through ups and downs spikes. Doing so much in two hours, then doing nothing for three. Doing so much in one week, then doing very little for two. Feeling on top of the world for a day, then feeling like a loser for two. I feel that the next version of myself is someone fully grounded on himself and fully focused on what he wants to do, and does it with tiger-like speed and force. Then rest how much he needs, nothing less, nothing more, and starts again. I feel that my current version is attached to results and high states of morale, making my rhythm of work and peace very volatile. A big key to this, I suppose, is to increase the rate of “just do things”, while attuning the sense of what I actually want to do and own it.

• Related to this, last point: overthinking vs just doing the thing, overoptimizing and going into mental decision loops before actually settling down on an option weeks later vs taking a deep afternoon thinking session and committing to the next best step.

• I used to be the rational and structured person in the room, I lost that a bit and need to claw that back. I feel this particularly when speaking out loud. Compared to many good friends, it takes me quite a bit more to level the thoughts and put them in line in a cohesive, logical, meaningful way. I literally, sort of, feel my neurons firing hard, but not receiving as much signal back as needed. Writing is my safe zone: I can read what I think, I can re-adjust, I can take my time, I can pause, I can delete. I want to achieve that level of comfort with my out loud thinking too. I often compare myself to my high school years, when I was literally solving math exercises twelve hours a week plus the rest. So, to be fair, I think I am just out of training.

• If I mentioned before that doing things fast is something I need to work on, a shadow side of that is that I can easily go into rat-race mode and never zoom out for months. This essay is quite meta on that: I did write a lot about my inner world in the previous months, but it never occurred to me that I didn’t have a high-level snapshot of it all at hand.

• Identifying myself with the work I do brings a whole set of weaknesses. Many resistances I have when starting out happen because if I fail, it is not the project that does, it is my right to exist on this planet. When I receive feedback, sometimes a part of me takes that hyper personally and tries to overcompensate and prove his worth with this childish megamaniac thinking, “So not the fit for your product team? I guess I am forced to become the best engineer on the planet and build a billion-dollar company just for you to realise how much of a shitty decision you’ve just taken”. Needless to say, when that happens, I feel like I have a monkey in the living room jumping around while I am just trying to live a normal life. There is a whole feeling superior / feeling inferior conversation too, instead of just operating eye to eye with the rest of the world, which always boils down to feeling deeply and fully ok with myself. A good way there, not quite tho yet.

• Conflict avoidance.

• Raising the bar size-wise immediately on things I wanna do, in an attempt to justify and legitimise that I wanna do those things. A simple thing I was excited to do thus becomes this new mission a hundred times bigger than myself, I start to live in that projection, I start to do things not out of enjoyment but out of completing that projection, which makes me absent in the present and rightfully stop.

• Related to this, therefore, having difficulties in accepting and prioritizing what really matters to me.

• Self-defensive ego. I did a lot of work in allowing the need to self-express, and I’m very happy to come this far. Writing so transparently, so openly, and so freely both on this blog and on LinkedIn is something that took me months to unlock (or you could argue, passively, years). I feel that I am now ready to upgrade the work, not in terms of reaching more people or making money out of it, but to improve the work to match my improved state of growth. And yet, I feel the tension between that and a part of me that instead wants to keep it the way it is. There is a fine line between real self-expression and keeping things the way they are because outgrowing them feels dangerous, and I feel I am on that side of the line. I want to write bolder things, I wanna tap into the 80% of things I think that I haven’t shared yet, I wanna do it more often, more beautifully, and I wanna do smart work in putting it in places where my surface area of luck is maximised, while still keeping it as art, while being serious about it.