Booklife: Strengths and Weaknesses

I’m currently reading Jeff VanderMeer’s Booklife, a “how to” guide of sorts for writers at every career stage. It is an informative, interesting read that covers subjects ranging from getting enough exercise to communicating with agents to setting up a Facebook page. Many of the tips seem obvious but it is often the most obvious things that the brain can glance over in disinterest, thus losing the actual meaning behind it.

On the Booklife Now blog, VanderMeer excerpts himself on the subject of finding your strenghts and weaknesses and learning how to operate with or around them:

How can you work on problem areas without being overwhelmed? Make a list of your strengths, your weaknesses, and those gray areas in between—things you’re not terrible at but not great at, either. Even though you’ve presumably had others help you evaluate your strengths and weaknesses to get to this stage, take this list and give it to a couple of friends or colleagues you didn’t include in your original analysis. Ask them if your list is accurate. After you’ve included their feedback, and been totally honest with yourself, do the following:

—Break the Strengths list down into subcategories, rating yourself in each, so you have a better idea of what those strengths mean. Stay aware of your strengths even as you work on your weaknesses and make sure shoring up weaknesses doesn’t negatively affect your strengths.

—Select two items from the Gray Areas list that you think you can easily improve and that would help your writing career. Make sure your short-term and long-term goals include ways to better yourself in these areas.

—Select one item from the Weaknesses list, even if it’s something that also scares you. Add elements to your short-term and long-term goals that give you opportunities to make this weakness a strength, or at least something you’re not bad at anymore.

—Select one item from the Weaknesses list that you don’t want to work on improving. This advice especially applies if something on your list scares you too much. Setting it off to the side is about preserving your mental health. You can always revisit it in the context of success with some other weakness.

I am not a fan of advice books in general because I tend to find them less than useful. But I decided to purchase Booklife because it had a section devoted to one of my weaknesses: online networking.

I suffer from a curious weakness of being much more shy online than I am in person. My communication style, offline, is rather dependent on being able to hear the other person (though hearing and seeing is preferred). Tone of voice, body language… those things say a lot. And they are absent from casual forms of communciation on the internet.

While I would have no problem whatsoever approaching a musician who had just played in a small club to say that I loved his or her music, I become paralyzed when faced with the prospect of emailing an artist whose illustrations I have become a fan of online. How do I smile and extend a hand for a shake online?

I am making baby steps of progress: commenting on blogs, chatting with a couple of people through email. But it is still an area I need to work on for both my professional career and personal life.