Every Strength Is a Weakness

Julie Zhuo spent years getting the same feedback: 'You're incredibly thoughtful' alongside 'You don't speak up quickly enough in meetings.' For a long time, she treated these as two separate things - one to celebrate, one to fix.

Then she realized: they're the same thing. Because she doesn't do snap judgments, she's able to be deeply thoughtful. The weakness creates the strength.

This reframes how we see our children.

The stubborn child? That's a future adult who won't be pushed around. The sensitive one who cries at everything? Emotional intelligence in raw form. The one who won't stop asking 'why?' That's intellectual curiosity dressed as annoyance. The rule-follower who can't handle any deviation? Reliability and conscientiousness, before they've learned when to flex.

Julie's insight: we're all infinite dimensions. Every trait is a dial, not a binary. Your child being 'too much' of something often means they have a superpower that hasn't learned context yet.

Your job isn't to eliminate the trait. It's to help them understand when to turn the dial up and when to turn it down. The stubborn kid needs to learn when flexibility helps. The sensitive kid needs to learn when to protect themselves. But the underlying trait? That's not a bug to fix. That's a feature to calibrate.