And it’s only as we compensate for those disadvantages that our greatest gifts are revealed. Seventy percent of the art students that 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. Our greatest advantages may not be what we perceive as our greatest advantages. Our greatest advantages may actually be hidden in our greatest disadvantages, if we learn to leverage them. And one key to discovering your soulprint is identifying those disadvantages via careful, and sometimes painful, self-inventory. Your destiny is hidden in your history, but it’s often hidden where you would least expect to find it. Your destiny isn’t just revealed in your natural gifts and abilities. It is also revealed in the compensatory skills you had to develop because of the disadvantages you had to …show more content…
When the tendency was familial in nature one might find that a whole series of members suffered from a disorder that tended to attack one organ, and when organ inferiority is an individual tendency a disease would be liable to localize in the inferior organ since it is a common experience to find that inferior organs fail first in their compensation when the organism is infected or under a particular stress. To Adler the inferiority represented a defect in the material available for the construction of a normal well balanced personality pattern, and it became a point of crystallization for the mental superstructure of compensation and hypercompensation; moreover, this organ inferiority tends to increase the compensate experienced by every child resulting in an intensification of the striving towards an often unattainable