Your Greatest Strength Is Your Greatest Weakness: Steve Willison And Mark Newfield On JUST PRESS RECORD

I have a brother who’s 10 days shy of 2 years younger than me. If you have a close in age sibling, you already know where this is going. Some days we were best friends, some days we made Cain and Able look like model citizens.

Nobody can get under your skin like a sibling.

My mom used to try to remind me, “The same things you love the most about him, they’re no different from the things that annoy you the most.”

I used to push back, “That assumes there’s something I love about him.” She didn’t need to respond to that. The look (you know the one) would do.

All that spastic energy he had in elementary and middle school… I didn’t mind it so much in high school, when we started playing in bands together. Turns out, if you tuck that lil freak behind a drum set, he wasn’t so bad. The energy had a place to go, and you don’t usually punch the guy with sticks.

Our relationship grew on a new list of shared goals, and hey, thanks to our house’s basement (parents’, ahem, I get this now), our relationships multiplied as we brought friends-turned-bandmates into our schemes.

Whenever I think about strengths and weaknesses, and how they might match up, I always think about them in the terms of my mom. I think about how she tried to pass on the most charitable interpretation of my mostly annoying little brother. I think about how she was right.

And then I remember it applies to me too.

These days it’s my wife who tells me I’m a crazy person. She also tells me she loves me. But, she reminds me, she’s trying to help me not be a crazy person all of the time, pointing out how if it’s part of what she fell in love with, just not the whole part. All things in moderation. Or, all things in some type of (sane) balance.

I was in a conversation with a human resources professional who just so happens to have written a book about stoicism and a financial advisor/consultant who just so happens to be as obsessed with stoicism as he is behavioral psychology and they brought this whole idea up, front and center.

Mark Newfield, the advisor/consultant/psych guy, said (paraphrasing), "Part of my principle set or operating system is: your greatest strength is, at the same time, your greatest weakness. And recognizing when it's working on one side or the other is important."

Steve Willison, our HR/stoic added (paraphrasing): "You cannot control it, but you can influence it. And it's the understanding between control and influence that gives you somewhat of a peace of mind. So, you kind of let it go, and say, look, I can't control it, but I could start to influence things.”

They were saying this, and I was picturing my brother. Full of energy, attention darting in every available direction, unable to sit still. All until “1-2-3-4 (play the song).”

This is stoicism in action. This is recognizing what we can influence versus what we can't control. This is finding peace in that distinction, and this is making peace with a strength and weakness mutually existing in fully conflicted plain sight without being upset about it.

The operating system for my brother and I, together, was to get the energy and the attention focused on a common task. We had to organize the noise so the disorganized noise wouldn’t wreck us. We didn’t have control over the final outcomes, but we did have control over our influence, on the noise, on the setting, to keep us in a mode of agreement, and it changed the course of our relationship.

I’ll send him a message this morning with this post. Brothers are wonderful things. So are strengths AND weaknesses.

If you want to be a fly on the wall for the conversation that inspired this reflection, my JUST PRESS RECORD with Mark Newfield and Steve Willison is out now. Get it on Cultish Creative YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. Here’s the fastest way there: