One Thin Dime

The North American ten cent piece isn’t of much value any more, but it holds a place in our culture, nonetheless.

“It’s your dime!” means that since you paid for the call, you have the floor. Not that there are many phone booths left, and a dime wouldn’t do you any good if you could find one. A dime’s not worth a dime, anymore.

“Turning on a dime” means a very short turning radius, or a change of direction with little warning. “A dime a dozen” means plentiful and commonplace. “At the drop of a dime” suggests readiness, and “to be nickel and dimed” means that someone is haggling you without mercy.

The ten cent piece is the thinnest of our coins and as such inhabits a place in our language when you want to suggest that not much separates one thing from another, particularly two things which are attached yet opposite. Thus it is that we say that “heads and tails are separated by only a very thin dime”, meaning that certain characteristics or qualities are opposites, yet both belong to the same entity.

Nowhere is this notion more true than when we consider our strengths and weaknesses. More often than not the very things which make you uniquely gifted are also areas of danger and weakness. So in the analysis of our Giftings, we usually come face to face with our personal weaknesses.

Take, for example, the Dreamer. Dreamers are those who imagine a different world, a different outcome, possibilities that most of us don’t consider. They drive progress by showing us new potentials. Edison was a Dreamer, as was Alexander Graham Bell.

But if your Gifting may be as a Dreamer, your Achilles Heel may be that you are a “Wool Gatherer”, that is, you can spend your entire life fantasizing and daydreaming, la-la-la-la-la, skipping merrily from one charming fantasy to another. They’re very nearly the same thing, but one is harnessed for good, while the other is a runaway stagecoach.

Someone whose Gifting is being super-organized can also find himself micromanaging every tiny detail of existence, a squirrel cage of perpetually tidying one’s desk and never actually getting anything done.

We could go on, example after example, but you get the point. It helps us understand why so many among us who are exceptionally bright never seem to get off the runway. Perhaps it’s because they’re working the wrong side of the dime.

Heads, you win…