Don’t Waste Your Superpower
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Whatever makes you weird, is probably your greatest asset.
Joss Whedon
We all want to fit in—be like everyone else.
But there’s always something weird about each one of us.
Maybe we look different.
Maybe we act different.
Maybe we think different.
As children, we were teased and maybe even bullied because we were different.
We wanted to fit in.
But the harder we tried, the more it was obvious that we were different.
It felt like we were living on the island of misfit toys.
Eventually, if we were fortunate, we made peace with our weirdness.
We accepted it as something we just had to live with.
But what if that weirdness was an asset and not a liability?
Instead of just living with what is different about us, we should embrace the strangeness.
We can reframe the weirdness as a gift.
We can ask ourselves, “How can I use this unusual trait as an advantage?”
A model with an odd facial feature, a singer with an imperfect voice, a student with dyslexia — all have the opportunity to cultivate their imperfection as an asset.
If we try to hide our weirdness, however, it will feel like a curse rather than a gift.
It will take work to turn our strangeness into a benefit.
The hardest part will be to change how we think about it.
Then we can refine it into a valuable asset.
Here is an example from my life.
I am a naturally lazy person.
I have harnessed my laziness and turned it into a useful skill.
I can always find a more efficient way to do any task.
Even as a child working with my dad as a reluctant helper, I would ask, “Why are we doing this the hard way?”
Being a child, not every “easy way” was actually easier.
But with practice, I got better and better at discovering more efficient ways to accomplish just about everything.
Most people think of laziness as an aversion to work, but I thought of it as an aversion to unnecessary work.
This allowed me to use my laziness to become more productive.
What is it that makes you different?
With the right mindset and some fine-tuning, that weirdness can become your superpower.
Now available at Amazon: The Courageous Heart: Wisdom for Difficult Times in paperback and eBook.
