For the last two years, I've been taking part in the Wednesday Weekly Blogging Challenge over at Long and Short Reviews. I've had a great deal of fun with it, so naturally I'm continuing it this year. If you'd like to participate, follow that first link for the list of prompts, and then check the main site for the weekly post with links to everyone's responses (and add your own link, if you're so inclined).
Today's prompt is "my greatest strength" and... boy, howdy, that took me a minute. I am not feeling anything to do with greatest strengths right now; we're thawed out and everything's getting going again, but this past week has been yet another object lesson in just how much of what we call "civilization" is actually just a murderous scam. Still...
All right, I can answer this. And actually, I think I have two answers for it.
In daily life (and especially in my work), my greatest strength is patience. I do a fair amount of troubleshooting and training (in addition to maintaining and updating some computer systems) and in both cases, the ability to just... not get frustrated... is invaluable. Explaining things in simple English is also a surprisingly useful skill; hire liberal arts folks for technical positions, y'all.
(It helps to remember that an awful lot of things are very obvious once you've seen them, but not at all obvious before then. I have a lot of users who are like, "I'm so stupid about this stuff," and they're really not; they're just dealing with detailed and slightly finicky process that they only use every couple of months. Of course they're not going to remember how it works, even if they take notes -- and a lot of them do.)
So day-to-day, I'd list patience as my greatest strength.
But every once in a while -- and this is actually kind of related -- I think my greatest strength, my actual super-power, is the ability to Just Not Care about unimportant things. Major system just went down! Whose fault is it!? I don't care, how do we fix it? I posted something on the website two hours ago, then got sent an update to replace it with... and then another, and then another? I don't care, it still needs to go up. Project leader has decided that we're going to do something the difficult, unreliable way that will make more work for us in the long run as well as the short term? I can't affect the decision, so I don't care.
I cannot tell you just how much I despise the phrase "It is what it is" -- as far as I can tell, it always means "this is stupid, difficult, and could be easily resolved but we're going to do it this way anyhow" -- but when I find myself in or adjacent to one of those situations, the ability to Just Not Care comes in very handy.
I love your strengths... and patience is certainly a good one to have! And, re: "just don't care"... an auxiliary maxim... major on the majors and let the minors take care of themselves. Things have a way of working out it you are patient, positive, and take care of the things you can take care of.
ReplyDeleteYes, to some extent it's less about Not Caring and more about Focusing On What's Important.
DeletePatience IS a virtue. :-)
ReplyDeleteRe: "It is what it is" -- I use that phrase a lot, but for me it means "What's happened/happening is what's happened/happening and there's nothing we can do about it but just live with what happened/is happening as best as we can." Sometimes stuff happens and it's utterly out of our control. So, it is what it is. :-)
I mean, if you're talking about stuff that genuinely can't be helped, that would make sense. I usually only hear it when the situation is out of my control, but still the result of somebody's misplaced priorities or boneheaded decision-making. {{sigh}}
DeleteYes, you are a very patient person!
ReplyDeleteHow did you learn to care less about why stuff happens? I'm so curious. :)
I'm not really sure. I sometimes think it's more a matter of me being ADHD and possibly out the edge of the autism spectrum as well; my priorities are just different. What's important to me isn't always what people expect.
DeleteI did serve as admin for an online writing/roleplaying site for a while, and one of the things I learned was that when somebody brings up an issue, the first question isn't "How do we solve this?" but rather, "Is this actually a problem, and if so, what exactly is the problem?" I treasure this as my one personal insight into political leadership.
It does feel like civilization is a murderous scam more than I wish it did. Patience and the ability to not to care about unimportant things really help in this craziness, but also help with stress management. Sometimes I think I get caught up in the little things, cause the big things seem to far away to fix.
ReplyDeleteMy tot and DH are really good at the appearance of not caring aka being laid back about stuff. I wish I had that. Then again, I wish I had patience, too. Lol. Good for you that you have both.
ReplyDeletePatience and not caring are definitely great skills to have. I think I lost the ability to care about a lot of things as I got older.
ReplyDelete