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Discussion on: How do you turn a weakness into a strength?

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steelwolf180 profile image
Max Ong Zong Bao • Edited

Since I was young, I'm pretty bad in writing as I learnt to read & write at 7 years old before that I'm mostly speaking Chinese in my country. I'm kind of a odd duck surrounded by kids your age that is mostly speaking English. I was mostly surrounded with Hong Kong movies/music and dramas, Taiwan music and local tv dramas in Chinese.

My writing skills is so bad that my university classmates always hate me. As I tend to have grammar errors and spelling mistakes from time to time. So they banned me from contributing or ridiculed me in my bad writing when it comes to group assignments.

I sort overcame it by blogging, which at the start I was pretty scared of criticism in my blog articles. But through the books I read like "Crushing It" and "Soft Skills: The Software Developer's Life Manual".

I found out that writing was actually a very important skill as you progress your career from a IC to management while building your own personal brand as a developer.

So I sort of started to focus on "documenting" on what I know and learnt along the way. Instead of being fearful of ridicule for my bad writing by a stranger in the internet.

Now from time to time, I get approached by people to write paid articles and was even given a job opportunities to work in devrel for Microsoft . So I guess I sort turn my weakness into strength now.