Your weakness is your strength

Remember Anne Hathaway’s stilted speech about love in Interstellar? Yikes. It’s nonsense dressed up to sound smart.

But one day it occurred to me that the whole movie is nonsense dressed up to sound smart. The plot is an impossible circle of cause and effect, with some real science thrown in to sell the absurdity. And that’s the whole point! That’s why I like the movie. But I hated that speech for the same reason.

And now I see this principle at work all over the place: a person’s weakness is also their strength. To strip them of their flaws is to strip them of what made you care about them in the first place.

Spielberg is schmaltzy as hell, and sometimes he makes me roll my eyes. But when his work soars, it soars because he’s schmaltzy as hell.

It’s true in life, too. Reflect on it awhile, and you’ll see. All your supposed flaws are the best parts of you.