I am currently reading a very interesting book: “Principles” by Ray Dalio It was recommended to me by several sources, most notably by Sebastian Marshall. Sebastian focuses a lot on personal improvement in his work. I value his ideas and ideas very much. So it made sense to me to follow his recommendation to read this book.

Ray Dalio writes about his personal journey towards being one of the most influential and successful investors in history. On his way he made several mistakes, but he often recovered and eventually found his way to success. His work and life principles made all the difference for him. He evaluated himself in several psychological tests, as well as all his partners and employees. This way they could find out how this group of people was “wired” and how they could best work together. Ray encourages the reader to take some of these tests as well, to find out how you, the reader, thinks. What are your weaknesses, what is against your personality? Where do you excel at?

Once you identified your weaknesses you have at least three options for dealing with it :

  • Ignore it
  • Get better at it
  • Delegate to people more capable than you

The first is the easiest and shouldn’t really be an option. The third might be a good solution for a few situations. If you know about this weakness, you are in a situation to find a solution because it’s not a blind spot anymore. So delegating this topic really might be the best option. The second option is the hardest, but might also offer the greatest reward. To get better at your weaknesses you have to constantly work on them.

Here’s one of my weaknesses that I found out about: I like to do high-level planning, create great strategies and execute on them. When it comes to the lower-level details of implementation I often get bored. I am a perfectionist in my work, but once things are at ~80% I tend to lose interest. This is a general trait of my character. I tested as an Architect.

I believe this sometimes shows in my work as well. I do not generally procrastinate, but I do not like to do repetitive tasks or more low-level stuff. I am thinking about writing all kinds of variations of tests, for example. I surely write the happy-path and the 80%/necessary tests, but I would rather take on the next task than bring test coverage up to 100% with all these tiny edge-case-tests… Also waiting on tests to complete… I’d rather continue reading my book! I believe I am not alone in that, but anyway.

Because I am feeling confident that “escaping from repetition or boredom” is a weakness of mine (just to give it a name 🙃), I devised a simple strategy for dealing with it. This email is rather getting long, so I will write about my strategy (and how well it worked) another time.

What about you? Did you take any personality tests? Do you know about your weaknesses (and strengths! These are also important to know)?

Holger