Chase the Lion: If Your Dream Doesn't Scare You, It's Too Small

by Mark Batterson

Around the turn of the twentieth century, Alfred Adler proposed the counterintuitive theory of compensation. Adler believed that perceived disadvantages often prove to be well-disguised advantages because they force us to develop attitudes and abilities that would have otherwise gone undiscovered. It’s only as we compensate for those disadvantages that we discover our greatest gifts.4 Seventy percent of the art students Adler studied had optical anomalies. He observed that some of history’s greatest composers, Mozart and Beethoven among them, had degenerative traces in their ears. And he cited a multiplicity of other examples, from a wide variety of vocations, of those who leveraged their weaknesses by discovering new strengths. Adler concluded that perceived disadvantages, such as birth defects, physical ailments, and poverty, can be springboards to success. And that success is not achieved in spite of those perceived disadvantages. It’s achieved because of them.