WEAKEST LINK

June 25th, 2018

A chain is only as strong as it’s weakest link.

One would be hard pressed to find a concept that has been more over-used in recent years.

Why is there no talk of chainmail?

No person is a single link.  A more apt analogy for our psychology is chainmail.  We may not have strong links in every area.  Hell there may even be missing links and holes.  But this does not mean we snap and fail completely like a chain holding some weight, like a person bearing a single gargantuan stress. 

Life is a bit more multi-disciplinary than such images suggest.

Best to think of a net, one that can be used very effectively even if it’s not in perfect shape.  One that can be repaired, a net that needs maintenance and elbow-grease-love.

Just as a broken automatic sliding window doesn’t rule out the usefulness of a car, the chain image is of little use except to pigeonhole people and their efforts, to falsely delineate more clearly a sense of good and bad, failed and reliable.  Our insufferable penchant for such dichotomies is bad in that it gives us an inaccurate way of interpreting events, people and ideas, and blinds us from potential missed opportunities.  We see only a broken link when potentially we could see a valuable resource put to work in a different capacity.

Another cultural proverb illuminates this problem:  don’t throw out the baby with the bathwater. 

Or as Voltaire once put it: don’t let the best be the enemy of the good.

Yes there are weak links in all of us.

And as long as we don’t neglect them for too long and let them accumulate. . .

None of them are deal breakers.