figuring out what you're bad at

Back in 2004, I was friends with Adam Gnade And Jesse Duquette, the husband and wife pair that started Fahrenheit, a weekly magazine here in San Diego. It ran from May of 2003 to July of 2004, and I ran into them off and on for the roughly year long run before it crashed in flames.

I learned a few things from them, and it fits with some of the reading I've been doing concerning business startups. I found some really great articles on startup tips ( 36 startup tips, 18 mistakes that kill startups, building technology instead of products, startup failures), and a consensus view is forming.

Fahrenheit was a great magazine overall, from a reader's point of view. I wrote a few cover page articles myself, and always enjoyed the stories that I read. However the failure of Fahrenheit wasn't from a lack of writing, it was from poor distribution networks and a lack of sales revenue. Two things that (for the most part) writers don't invest a lot of time in.

As an engineer, I can tell when a company cares about engineering. You can feel what a company's priorities are all rather quickly. The content of the meetings, the position of offices, the marketing tools, the seniority of various staff members, etc. And for any other engineers out there, you know how much of a difference it can make if the people at the top care about IT, or if they view it as some necessary evil. They're glad someone else is taking care of it, and they know it's essential in the long run, but they have zero interest in it personally. It shows in staffing levels, technology adoption, confidence in IT (which in turn impacts morale), and dozens of other hard-to-calculate ways.

So for Fahrenheit, even if they found the right sales person, it would have made as much difference as bringing a stellar engineer into a company that occupies that engineer's time with the wrong kind of work, frustrates them, and just generally doesn't fully utilize them. Which of course will create a self fulfilling prophecy, whereby the engineer doesn't perform as well, re-enforcing the lack of confidence that leadership has in engineering, causing them to invest even less resources.

The cliff notes to all of this is that unless you are trying to mitigate your weaknesses, and you're in a leadership capacity, your weaknesses will not only affect you personally but will create deep seeded flaws that will submarine you.

You already know what you're good at. Focus on what you're bad at. You don't need to fix them all, but be aware of them all, and don't let them get the best of you.