Please read the wonderful e-mail I received from a very close and respected friend, who sent this to me around 1,5 years ago. There are many lessons to be learned from this wonderful piece. It is a constructive criticism on my work in general, which I would especially recommend you to read the parts on bold.
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‘’ First of all, you are doing a great job, but of course there is room for improvement – to discover this room we are in AEGEE. ………
…… All the things mentioned above can still be improved and developed. Not that it would be very urgent, but as a perfectionist I know that you want to be always better than you were before. The only real criticism I can think of, but which I cannot direct to you because I make the same mistake all the time, is that you want to do too many things at the same time, that you overestimate capacities (you own as much as others’) and that you underestimate the amount of work it takes to make things as perfect as you would like them to be. You/we should be more thorough in planning everything in advance…….
……Like me, you are a kind of dominant personality. When we develop an idea, first we think really much about it, we want to cover all aspects and develop a complete picture of it, and as a result we are very convinced about it and we want to convince others. This is the quality of a leader, because only if you can convince people of your ideas, you can strive for big achievements. But in a team, where everybody is equal and you need to find a common ground, this approach does not work. We know this, but in some moments our ideas take possession of us, and we start convincing people at a time when we should rather be listening to others a bit more. We need to learn to be even more aware of ourselves and our position related to the people around us. A leader among leaders is still a leader, but it is a situation where listening is more important than convincing.
…..You know that you have talent, but you want to have recognition and appreciation all the time. And when you don’t get in a moment where you think you deserve it, you start insisting……. This is what we need to be aware of, that you can be an important person in general, but that in specific moments, other things and other persons count more and are in the spotlight, and there is no point in trying to get your share of the glory.
I thought about this a lot during my life, and I discovered that the main reason for my own narcism is an attitude that I already mentioned before: that I want to do too many things at a time. And in turn, the reason for me to want to do too many things at a time is that I am a dreamer. And you are a dreamer, too. We are dreamers because our heads are faster than our hands. We are intelligent and we recognise what needs to be done, and we recognise this faster than we can actually implement it. This way, more and more ideas gather in our heads, but we don’t have enough time to implement them, because new ideas appear much faster than we can handle the old ideas. But of course, it is unacceptable for us that we just drop some of these ideas. All our ideas are valuable and worth implementing. Therefore, we try something that is impossible, namely to implement all of them. Even though we didn’t finish the old project, we already start two new ones.
Again, what we need to learn is to pick our most important ideas, and concentrate all our available forces on it. This can be a bit painful, because sometimes it will mean rejecting good ideas just because of time constraints. But there is no other way, if we really want to achieve the full implementation of our ideas – of some of them.
The same story with our talents: we have different talents, but not enough time to develop them all. I could be a professional violinist or football player or writer or politician – but if I continue like this, I will end up with nothing. I never focused enough on any of these fields to be as good as I know I could be. And when I meet people who actually focused on one of their talents, who are as good as they could be in this one specific field, I could die of envy. I know that I missed this chance, and I would have loved to develop this talent in the same way, but I never did, even though I could have done so. This is where narcism is born – I want the recognition for something that I know I COULD be, but AM not. And this is true for talents as much as for ideas, initiatives. We want the recognition for our talent, for our ideas. But we only get the recognition for our achievements. Because talents and ideas are not measurable. We should keep this in mind….
