Finding the perfect weakness (and other contradictions)

"What are some of your weaknesses?"

This is another job interview question to which a completely honest answer would bar me from employment...probably forever.

This is a really confounding question because you have to figure out which response makes you seem human, but not too human. I'm told that the ideal response involves some extremely common and minor "weakness" that you turned into a valuable learning experience. For instance: "I used to be really afraid of speaking in front of crowds until I had to make a speech in front of the school's budgetary committee so that our magazine would have sufficient funding for the upcoming issue. The urgency of the situation and my successful appeal really helped to bolster my confidence in both professional and public settings." In other words, an ex-weakness. An ex-weakness that gave you some skill that you can use in the job you're trying to win.

(And yes, I plan to use the above example. So don't just steal it word for word, okay?)

Now, I don't know if employers recognize that applicants are all flawed human beings with a plethora of less-than-godly traits that they have not yet overcome and/or learned business skills from. If they do, are they trying to determine how well we hide our actual weaknesses and keep them from hampering our performance at work? Do we ever get points for honesty? I mean, doesn't a statement like "I would have loved to have seized that lecherous manager by the arm and fed each of his fingers into an electric pencil sharpener until he apologized for harassing everybody in the office, but I never did!" show an enormous amount of self-control and an admirable sense of priority? I think so. I think it reveals many positive things about the applicant's character. Positive things that far outweigh the so-called weakness of secretly wanting to mutilate a sleazoid co-worker.

Which raises an important point: what if weaknesses are just the flip side of strengths? Or, at the very least, what if examining our weaknesses helped to remind us of our strengths rather than our seeming lack thereof?

I'm thinking of compiling a brutally comprehensive list of my weaknesses. In fact, I don't think I can get a real sense of my strengths until I take a huge emotional shit* and get all of the festering nasty stuff out of there first. And then see if everything's really as unpleasant as it seems.

*Coming soon!