Everyone wants to know what makes a good "weakness" and I am no exception. My recommender and I discussed that in the beginning I communicated too much detail to people who weren't necessarily detail-oriented/numbers-oriented. For example, I used to send very detailed budget reports to creative people. But I've worked on learning people's learning style and am much better at communicating the big picture now. Is "detailed-oriented" the right weakness to discuss here or is it written communication? (Keep in mind that my strength is my quantitative skills). Can business school further help to teach me to be a big picture thinker and if so how can I or my recommender communicate this?
The TRICK to choosing the right weakness/failure story is the although you may FAIL, the story itself should be impressive. So for example you can show a weakness of how you were immature in school and thus didn't get great grades. But you aren't likely to impress anyone with that story. On the other hand, if because you were too authoritarian in your first leadership experience, you let down your team of 20 which was working on a three billion dollar project, even if you FAIL it's impressive. So if you crash, crash hard.
The idea is that the challenge you face and the actions you take should be great. You can climb your town's hill, or you can climb Everest. Guess which one's gonna make a better story...
