The Sunjay Times

In my quest to better understand myself, I found these words by Penelope Trunk to be pretty insightful:

People do what their strengths are regardless of what their job description is. Real leaders will lead in any situation they find themselves. Real writers will always write, no matter what their day job is. And real strategists will always think in terms of the conceptual future, from any job they have

** and to rant a little, a big thank you to the script kiddies who are DDoS’ing my web host. If this site seems slow or unresponsive, it’s because it’s under attack. Just come back later.

Recently, I had two people I know who were relatively distant to me, make spot-on comments about me that really confirmed some thoughts I have been having about myself. When I say “distant”, I mean that we don’t regularly hang out, rarely meet each other, and don’t exchange communication much.

This is not to say that all strangers know you well, because that would be just absurd. What I have come to discover is that some of these “strangers” may inherently possess a skill: where they can quickly cut through surface clutter, size you up, and see the inner you quickly and quite accurately. This is also to say that sometimes it’s the people who are the closest to you, who see you day in and day out, that might not be able to give you insightful advice.

My attempt to reconcile this counter-intuitive phenomenon leads me to think that this might be one of those scenarios in problem-solving where the person who has the problem is too close to the problem, or too entrenched in the problem, to possibly see a solution. Hence the saying, “think outside of the box”. Too close to the source of the problem, and sometimes you’ll not just have difficulty coming up with more plausible solutions, but even have trouble in making the right judgement.
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