Fighting Hydra and the ugly heads of our weaknesses

Growing up with strict parents who hover like a hawk over your shoulder when you do math questions, I always hear the phrase “the word careless doesn’t exist in the dictionary!” I have always been a careless person and got beaten and scolded for losing marks over missing out the units, copying the wrong thing, some careless mistakes or another. I have always accepted that as part of my personality – I was a big picture person, and surely there is no need for me to compensate for my shortcomings because no one is perfect and this was but one of my imperfections.

Being in Artillery, however, I’ve suffered for not being precise and meticulous when everything we do uses the smallest and most precise unit in the Army. When compounded over the long range, a careless mistake becomes fatal. This is a bad fit for my personality and I always get stressed during assessments because I know that my carelessness will cost me something that I cannot afford to lose. I was forced to improve on what I chronically suck at, and there’s some things I learnt about self-improvement.

Firstly, in the most general sense (I am a big picture person after all) self-improvement as keeping your strengths and compensating for your weaknesses is something that is misguided. There’s too much emphasis nowadays for us to keep working on ourselves, chiselling our personality into a better version of the one yesterday. However, that is endlessly tiring because we will never be perfect and correcting every character flaw is like endlessly fighting Hydra and the ugly heads of our weaknesses. That is not to say that we should gladly love all parts of ourselves and condone our flaws as just part of who we are because more often it’s a guise for complacency. Self-improvement is not about tirelessly embodying the sculpture of “The Self-Made Man”, but to gain sufficient self-awareness about your strengths and weaknesses and recognising when to compensate for them based on what you need. My job needed me to be meticulous, and hence I had to rectify my carelessness. I leave aside other criticisms people have of me because those imperfections had no impact on what I need to do besides offending some people who don’t like me like that – and that’s just the way human relationships work. Heracles did not have to fight Hydra until he was told to do so by the King.

Secondly, one must be careful not to let self-improvement result in our struggle with our self-confidence. We stan character developments in our favourite protagonists because the struggle to become a better person is so romanticised. We want a beautiful character arc of our own and get stressed when we fail to correct some of our own shortcomings. Of course there is something cathartic and genuinely good about self-improvement, but more often than not our weaknesses are linked to our strengths and constantly undermining it takes a toll on how we perceive ourselves. Firstly, changing ourselves makes us lose sight of the aspects that made us proud before. In my case, being careless is a product of many other aspects of my personality that also contribute to my strength. Over compensating for it has changed what I was originally good at – I forget that my strengths lie in holistic developments rather than simply scoring well for exams. Secondly, changing yourself is a long and difficult process and it is disheartening to not see the result. Sometimes I might even feel that I have put in so much effort but have grown so little (I’ve been told that I was too imposing and need to give others a chance since forever, does that mean I’ve made zero progress at all?). The external negative feedback we base our self-improvement on is from people who know us at different points in our lives, so they rarely would be able to affirm my personal growth throughout the years (I am a lot less insufferable compared to my secondary school self already). Fighting our own weaknesses is something that is less neat than Heracles’ story arc and we need to remember that.

Lastly, since joining Artillery I have become a lot less careless than before, and this was only possible through some degree of coercion. I don’t think human beings are disciplined enough to follow through with self-improvement without an external pressure – my mother has been getting on my case about how I organise my things and leave lots of loose ends for years. I am not kidding when I say that I have been forced to correct my mistakes by the expectations and supervision of my training environment. If you have something you wish to change about yourself, put yourself into a spot where you will be held accountable for even in those moments you do not want to care – every time I tell myself “whatever it’s fine” I get punished by getting every single question wrong and having all that time and handwork go to waste, so eventually I learned my lesson. The inverse is true as well, when you wish to see someone improve in a particular area, be it men you lead or children in the future, one must be present to exercise some form of coercion. Changing isn’t something people like to do, so one must be resolved to make people do things that is unpopular.

Maybe it’s just end of the year things, but I have been feeling rather tired from trying to fight the never ending Hydra heads. Learning how to strike a balance between doing what I’ve been doing well and taking in feedback for self-improvement is one of my new year’s resolution because this year I have been preoccupied with overcompensating in the areas I have received feedback on. Maybe this year has left us alone with our idle thoughts for too long. I think we all deserve to give ourselves some recognition for how far we’ve come, striving to overcome some imaginary monster or another, and standing at the new stage of the game called adulthood.