I remember my cousins teasing me when we were growing up. They were both boys (men now) and in the way that boys sometimes do, they enjoyed making fun of me.
As a child, I remember visiting my uncle’s home during summer vacations, and one or both of them would always be up to some prank! There was a time when a neighborhood cat used to visit the house, and in between feeding her milk, they would take turns to make her jump from different levels of the house.
Once, they threw her off the terrace, which was thankfully, not too far up. The poor cat was unharmed & continued to return to the house afterward. Then, another time, they caught the cat and tried to make her walk on top of me when I was sleeping.
They were (and are) rumbunctious, fun and always pulling everyone’s legs.
As we grew up, these childish pranks changed to other good-natured ribbing. One of the things I remember them teasing me for was how I had a book for everything under the sun. Ritu has a book for everything, they would say.
If I was struggling with something, I would have some self-help book about that. If I was interested in something, I would have a book (or multiple books) about that.
I remember one time they were laughing at me that I really took to heart. Truth be told, I sometimes did use reading as a defense, as a way to avoid things, so maybe, something in what they said struck a guilty part of me.
But even apart from that, there was another reason.
For many years, I thought I was a “jack-of-all-trades and master-of-none kind of person” and felt a bit ashamed about it. I flitted from interest to interest. I loved to read about everything under the sun. I couldn’t make up my mind about what exactly I wanted to do.
In my mind, all this fluttering from one thing to the other was decidedly wrong. All this indiscriminate book-buying (I couldn’t seem to leave a book alone) was wrong. And for a little while in my 20s, I think I even tried to curb this “collect everything” tendency.
After all, what USE was all this book gathering?
But thankfully, at some point, my senses returned, and I realized something.
What’s useless for one person is useful for another.
And books had always been useful to me. I loved them. I had escaped into them during tough times. I had found solutions in them. I had found clues in them and found the right people to help me.
They were my treasure trove.
Even those books I bought and never read.
The mystery of why that is was solved a few years ago when I did the Gallup StrengthsFinder test, which tells you your top strengths. One of my Top 5 strengths is something called Input.
People with this strength are Collectors, often collecting not only things but information. And the purpose of this collection is not quite as random as it seems although we do LOVE what we collect.
We are collecting things we are deeply interested in. Those of us who love to collect information want to have every book or resource on that topic so we can either help ourselves or others in the future.
What we are really collecting is possibilities.
People with Input are synthesizers because they have a broad range of knowledge & love to look at things from different angles. They can also become experts at their topic because they love to research, know which sources of information are to be trusted, and so on. People often tell them that they learn new things whenever they talk to them.
As an example, check out New York Times bestselling author Gretchen Rubin’s website here. I can’t help but think she has Input as a strength. She collects quotes that she sends in newsletters, reads several books a week, and is doing an experiment right now where EVERY DAY she is in New York City (where she lives) and the Metropolitan Museum is open, she is visiting it. This last is as research for her next book. Talk about consuming information!
So, as you can see, there are a lot of great things about being someone who loves to collect information.
Learning that this collecting tendency is a STRENGTH freed me to buy any book I want even if I am not going to read it right away. What I am doing is adding it to my collection (and my Kindle Paperwhite counts, of course!)
I am collecting information that I think has potential, that I would like to reference in the future, and that is focused on subjects I have deep curiosities about. So, I have tonnes of books on Chakras, Dream Work, Jungian Psychology, Archetypes, and so on.
This makes me think back to who I was growing up. I wish I had collected more, not less! (By the way, It’s mostly books and art materials I collect, not other things. I have a low tolerance for “stuff” in general.)
What about you?
Are there any weaknesses you have that might actually be strengths? How can you invest in these areas?
Tip: If you love to collect books, think of yourself not only as a reader but as a librarian. That will free you to collect.
Also, developing Input as a strength means that you also need to ORGANIZE your collection. I recently organized my Bookshelves by subject (there’s a Dream Work section, one Artbooks section, etc). If we can’t access or find information, then collecting doesn’t serve its purpose later on.
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