I have been through a lot of job interviews, and a common question interviewers ask when they're out of important questions is “what’s your biggest weakness?” Invariably, in an attempt to imply that their biggest weakness is that everything they do is perfect, the interviewee will answer “perfectionism”. If they’re being honest however, and perfectionism really is their biggest weakness, then they’re telling the interviewer that they never get anything done.
A second weakness that nobody in their right mind would cop to in a job interview is procrastination. Lets let honesty reign again and all admit that if one tends to procrastinate at least a little, then one is likely in good company. Fortunately procrastination doesn't actually mean waiting to the last minute to work on everything, it only means waiting to the last minute to work on anything important. While waiting for those "last minutes" one tends to find plenty of other stuff to do that is easier, or more fun, and if one is lucky that other stuff is actually productive in some way and not just playing video games or watching sports on TV.
Using honesty as an excuse one more time, I'll say that I'm a perfectionist, though I try not to respond with that in interviews (I stumble clumsily over the biggest weakness question and eventually respond with "my stomach"). As long as I'm copping to things, and not in a job interview, I will also accept responsibility for occasionally falling victim to procrastination (See? It's not a weakness, I'm a victim!). Turning the corner on my project from development through final product and onto marketing my perfectionism and procrastination have begun to rear their ugly heads.
I've spent a lot of time and energy focusing on designing and developing a product under the misguided assumption that this is all that needs to be done, and once it's complete I'll have a business to run and will be self employed. The gap, of course, is marketing. For the last sixteen years, meaning precisely half of my life and my entire adult life, I have been focused on programming and software development. I like to think of myself as a very competent software engineer, capable of creating complicated products, but I have absolutely no experience marketing a product.
My perfectionism is not causing me to find the perfect way to market my product (remember being a perfectionist is a weakness), but procrastination is causing me to use my perfectionism as an excuse to find new features and design ideas for the product rather than try to market it. I constantly find myself thinking that it just needs one more feature, or perhaps the layout or aesthetics are bad and need to be redesigned, but the reality is that nothing I do to the product itself will cause more people to see it. I really need to buckle down and get to work on the part I don't know how to do and that I won't get perfect: marketing.
A second weakness that nobody in their right mind would cop to in a job interview is procrastination. Lets let honesty reign again and all admit that if one tends to procrastinate at least a little, then one is likely in good company. Fortunately procrastination doesn't actually mean waiting to the last minute to work on everything, it only means waiting to the last minute to work on anything important. While waiting for those "last minutes" one tends to find plenty of other stuff to do that is easier, or more fun, and if one is lucky that other stuff is actually productive in some way and not just playing video games or watching sports on TV.
Using honesty as an excuse one more time, I'll say that I'm a perfectionist, though I try not to respond with that in interviews (I stumble clumsily over the biggest weakness question and eventually respond with "my stomach"). As long as I'm copping to things, and not in a job interview, I will also accept responsibility for occasionally falling victim to procrastination (See? It's not a weakness, I'm a victim!). Turning the corner on my project from development through final product and onto marketing my perfectionism and procrastination have begun to rear their ugly heads.
I've spent a lot of time and energy focusing on designing and developing a product under the misguided assumption that this is all that needs to be done, and once it's complete I'll have a business to run and will be self employed. The gap, of course, is marketing. For the last sixteen years, meaning precisely half of my life and my entire adult life, I have been focused on programming and software development. I like to think of myself as a very competent software engineer, capable of creating complicated products, but I have absolutely no experience marketing a product.
My perfectionism is not causing me to find the perfect way to market my product (remember being a perfectionist is a weakness), but procrastination is causing me to use my perfectionism as an excuse to find new features and design ideas for the product rather than try to market it. I constantly find myself thinking that it just needs one more feature, or perhaps the layout or aesthetics are bad and need to be redesigned, but the reality is that nothing I do to the product itself will cause more people to see it. I really need to buckle down and get to work on the part I don't know how to do and that I won't get perfect: marketing.
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