Build On Your Strengths, Not Forgetting Your Weaknesses

"Not bad, but Samuel needs to improve on his English."

"Samuel should spend more time on reading English books."

"Samuel did very well, but he needs to brush up on his English."

These were what my parents used to hear from my teachers 9 out of 10 time whenever there was a Parent-Teacher-Meeting. The 10th time, my parents would say first before the teacher can open his/her mouth, because they were used to it.

"Samuel, what happened? Do you know that if you continue to fail your English, you will be retained next year?"

This was what my Secondary School vice principal, Mr. Fauzi, said to me during secondary 2.

"Samuel, come see me for one-to-one remedial lesson this Thursday."

Out of pure concern that I couldn't enter a university after A Levels, my General Paper (GP) tutor, Ms Ang, offered to give me remedial lessons about 4 months before A Levels, at least once or twice per week. (Strangely enough, I was my class GP representative for 2 years.)

Some of my better GP results. Yes, these are my higher scores.
My record (low) was a single digit our of 50 for
both Paper 1 and Paper 2.

I'm sure that from my first two posts, you would have seen that my command of English is not good. But the above shows how bad it is. I was nearly retained in secondary 2. I needed to appeal at the end of JC1 in order to continue my 4 A Levels subjects and to take up Special Papers, all because of my GP grades.

Everyone has his own strengths and weaknesses, you and me included. My weakness in school was of course English, writing, speaking and comprehending. I have always been told to spend more time on English, which of course fell on deaf ears. I spent my studying time on Mathematics, Physics, Chemistry, Geography, History, everything else except English/GP. When it was time away from these subjects, I would sleep. Who cares about the boring English/GP? At least this was what I thought.

Over the years, after so many times of nearly falling into the trap of passing every subjects (except English/GP) and yet got retained/rejected, I learned something very important. That is, of course, to continue to build on my strengths (the other subjects). This is purely because these are my interests and reading on these make me happy and passionate about school. However, what's more important is that while pursuing "happiness", I did not forget my weaknesses (English/GP) through constant reminders from the teachers. In the end, I'm lucky that although I did not get good grades for them, I made it! Thanks to the teachers.

Being more abstract on the title of this post, in the working world, this is no different. Our strength is the core skill that we use in our everyday work. Our weaknesses are, I would say, skills not needed in daily work but may be useful, either for work or for conversation with peers. My greatest technical strength at this moment is web development. I am much weaker in other areas, even in areas I have passion in, such as semi-conductor. However, I make it a point to at least know a bit of many things (yes, not everything but many things, else I will be stressed out). This is important because we don't know what skill or knowledge is needed in the next project, or even in the next hour.
Taking a recent example, although my core programming language is Ruby, my boss suddenly threw me a PHP question (and it was quite urgent), asking me to get a small feature out. If not for my little prior knowledge in PHP, I would have taken forever to do it.

In summary, do focus and continue building on your strengths, as these are the elements which make you effective at work, and many times, you will feel happy when you feel effective. While at this, spend a little time, even if it is just 30 minutes per day (this was roughly the amount of time I spent for English/GP), reading up on other things. It can be on any topic or topics which are important but you are bad at. The end result will be different, so do try it!

Before I end this post, I must really thank all my teachers who never give up on me, especially Ms Ang from AJC. I also want to thank Mr Fauzi, then vice-principal of AISS. Without him, I would have really forgotten my weaknesses and things would have been different, doesn't matter for good or for bad because I love where and what I am now.