As the quarter-mark of 2018 draws near, the main highlight has not been one of practicing strengths but instead, has been related to becoming more aware of my weaknesses. Paradoxically, this is also a double-edged finding. To be so pinpointedly aware of your faults exposes your mind to insecurities and instinctually compels you to seek safety in old mindsets that were safe and secure in the past, but ultimately unfulfilling or underwhelming.

The toughest challenge is to neither beat myself up over it nor attempt to beat the flaws over the head with a mental two-by-four. To do the former is to spiral downwards down the Eeyore path; the latter to play everlasting whack-a-mole.

An easy temptation is reflecting on the past and seeing your personal history as singularly rosy or constantly stormy, as if a few decades could be reduced to one word or phrase. The next trial is to overcome the coaxing of the present to cleave from the past, as if me now is Tyler Durden and me then is Edward Norton’s white-collar automaton. They are both one of the same.

A phrase stuck with me from reading this week: The bigger, eternal impediment to progress: the human resistance to change. While the quote addressed organizational and corporate changes, it was more piercing applied as a personal critique—my fear of change, or maybe a deeper fear of failure, was in the way of personal growth.

Life has many truthful contradictions. Balancing adulthood maturity with maintaining a childlike wonder. Regiments and strict schedules begetting creativity. Achieving internal peace by letting your competing interests go to war rather than accepting a temporary armistice. Add another: the greatest failure is living a life without failures to fear.

Once the education rat race wraps up, degree in hand and job in pocket, falling into the Ikea-furnished, cold+micro-brewed, 401k-driven late-20’s to 30’s honey trap is comforting. Bowling through life with the bumpers up, you’re not likely to truly get kicked in the kind of gutter that’s tough to climb out of. A great life—and I’ll boomerang this email to 10 years from now to see if I’ve drunk the Kool-Aid—but where is the real failure?

For now, cradling a coffee mug that isn’t mine, under a room that isn’t mine, in a country that isn’t mine, understanding past missteps is perhaps the next-best thing. Another cut-and-paste quote from the past week, from the mouth of a movie computer graphics dude who couldn’t get the production people to see the use of using new technology for movie-making instead of using the old method of taking exacto knives to their reels:

“Clearly, it wasn’t enough for managers to have good ideas—they had to be able to engender support for those ideas among the people who’d be charged with employing them.”

One colossal mistake that I made in leadership roles during college was believing that rooting people’s support of new initiatives, ideas, and changes in their faith in me as a person was enough of a buttress to ensure that such changes stuck more than a week or semester. But feeding the lifeline of support through me, the person behind the idea, as opposed to the validity of idea itself, left these initiatives dead in the water once I either left the room or lost motivation to compel others to care.

It’s equivalent to when a parent responds to a child with a “Because I’m your father and know what’s best for you.” True and honest, but at the same time patronizing and defensive, such as response never engenders a full buy-in. The ideas need to be good because they’re great ideas, not because they come from a person who, arrogantly or deservedly, holds herself in such high esteem.

And when that hot-headed or air-headed leader takes it upon himself alone, even success is underwhelming and temporary. What point is there in planting the flag on the moon if you’re doing it alone? There was the biggest weakness—to think that understanding myself would somehow solve my misunderstanding of others.

It is mildly comforting—maybe should be more than that—to have these realizations come up earlier, rather than later, when time isn’t nearly as much as a commodity as it will be. Can you make your ability to see your weaknesses clearly into a strength?