How to discover your strength in your weakness

                          

Interestingly, “Most people think they know what they are good at.” Peter Drucker says. “They are usually wrong.” On the contrary, “People know what they are not good at more often, and even there people are more often wrong than right.” Drucker’s view on one’s strength and weakness seemingly suggests you are more familiar, in tune and congruent with your weakness than your strength.

In my undergraduate days, I was taught a business feasibility concept: the SWOT analysis. The idea entails that one should know one’s strength, weakness, opportunity and threat in a familiar or an unfamiliar business terrain in order to thrive. However, the conundrum to the above concept is that you cannot know your strength, opportunity and threat, until you know your weakness.

 In your weakness, oddly enough, lies your strength. In your weakness lies your inherent divine imperative. Small wonder that Helen Wilmans remarked: “From the opinion of myself which constitute my weakness, I grew into another opinion which became my strength.” Helen went further in saying, “The weakest man living has the powers of a god folded within his organization; and they will remain folded until he learns to believe in their existence, and then tries to develop them.”

You are born with a divine imperative to deliver the strength in your weakness to humanity. Infinite intelligence deliberately designed your weakness to help others see the possibilities in them. The strength in your weakness is designed to remove resistance in the path of others coming behind.

And as Jesus passed by, he saw a man which was blind from his birth.

And his disciples asked him, saying, master, who did sin, this man, or his parents, that he was born blind?

Jesus answered, neither hath this man sinned, nor his parents: but that the work of God should be made manifest in him.

 

The above passage underpins the whole idea in this chapter: that the manifestation of the work of infinite intelligence necessitates that the man in the narrative be blind. Thus, your weakness is meant to show forth the work of infinite intelligence. In other words, your unique weakness was necessary just so that your life will deliver the inherent gift in you to the world.

A young lad, so the story goes, born in Edinburgh, Scotland, on March 3, 1847 to a family whose life long legacy was on speech elocution; his father was a professor of phonetics and his mother a deaf-mute.

At age 10, he made a plea to his father to have a middle name like his two older brothers. For his 11th birthday, his father acquiesced and allowed him to adopt the name “Graham.”

As a young child, he displayed a curiosity about his world. At age 12, he built a homemade device that combined rotating paddles with sets of nail brushes, creating a simple dehusking contraption that was put into use at the mill.

In October 1872, he opened his ‘School of Vocal Physiology and Mechanics of Speech’ in Boston United States. One of his private pupils was the renowned Helen Keller who could neither see, hear, nor speak.

He viewed deafness as something that should be eradicated completely. Fortunately, in his search for a solution he discovered a way to transmit sounds over a very long distance.

The name of this young man was Alexander Bell. Now formerly known and called Alexander Graham Bell. Bell was a deaf-mute like his mother and his wife. He was credited with inventing and patenting the first practical telephone. He also co-founded the American Telephone and Telegraph Company [AT&T].

Bell’s weakness later in life led him to experiment on sound transmission and eventually he had breakthrough in telecommunications. Through Bell’s weakness [deaf-mute], humans can sit in their living room in Lagos, Nigeria, in the continent of Africa, and communicate with another in Sydney, Australia. Consequently, to an astonishing degree and by nature’s design, the invention of the telephone perhaps have necessitated Bell’s deafness.

In his autobiography, Bell wrote, “When one door closes another door opens: but we so often look so long and so regretful upon the closed door that we do not see the ones which open for us.” Expressed somewhat differently, you should have an introspective valuation of the strength in your weakness rather than mourn over feeble vigour.

Like Thomas Carlyle would say: “Our business is not to see what lies dimly at a distance, but to do what lies clearly at hand.” Certainly, a man’s life consists not in the abundance of what he possesses, but in the consciousness of what he already has. Our aim and aspirations in life should be fully directed to perfecting, harnessing and being consistent with what we already have, rather than chasing shadows. We already have everything we need. We needn’t crave for more. Gandhi didn’t crave for more when he harnessed the power of nonviolent opposition to bulldoze and rid India of British rule, and neither did Martin Luther King Jnr when he was demanding for a society where people would not be judged by the colour of their skin but by the content of their character. However, these notions does not in anyways advocate complacency, rather it advocates that we look inward and use effectively what we already have.