What am I even good at?
One of the hardest moments in my career was realizing that I wasn’t especially good at the core competency of the work I was doing. Like many of my peers, my early career was in many ways successful, getting good jobs, raises, and promotions, but under the surface, I was struggling to keep up with my workload and producing impactful work. Eventually I realized that I wasn’t doing work that maximized my skillset, but it took me a long time to get there.
In this series of posts, I will explore:
1. Why it’s so dang hard to tell what we are actually good at
2. How to get your colleagues to reveal areas where you excel
3. How to find roles that match your basket of skills
I believe there are two primary reasons it can be so difficult to tell what we are truly good at.
The first reason it can be difficult to tell what we are good at is that we spend most of our lives being evaluated on a threshold basis, rather than a relative basis.
Grades, standardized tests, college admissions, each are asking us, did you learn what you needed to move on? Are you in line with your peers? Have you met the thresholds required to join us? Unfortunately, this doesn’t tell us about what will make us successful in that new context, nor what will make us ready for subsequent steps.
This leads to people finding themselves in jobs or grad programs related to math, or writing, or whatever subject they got good grades and test scores. This is usually fine to start, but eventually, we find ourselves struggling to reconcile success, promotions and raises, with increasing struggle, work life balance, doing good work, and building new skills*. This is because getting a good verbal SAT score doesn’t mean we will be good journalists, or, in my case, getting good grades in my econ classes doesn’t mean I was a good analyst.
The second reason it can be difficult to tell what we are good is because of what I call “invisible competencies.” Competency in a given area or skill exists on a spectrum, starting with being unaware that we lack competency in a skill, to actively working to acquire competency, through having so fully ingrained a skill that we aren’t even aware we are doing a “skill.” This is why we can have success, even when it feels like we aren’t getting better at our work. The value we provide is from things we aren’t even aware we are doing.
The trick then, is how to figure out what these invisible competencies are, and build a career around them, rather than on the things we happened to get evaluated on in school. I’ll explore techniques for figuring out these invisible skills in the next post in this series.
*if you read this sentence and thought to yourself, “but Basil, I was good at math in school, and got an advanced degree in math, and now do math for my job and still am great at it!” I am very happy for you and I apologize for wasting your time, and frankly am curious why you are reading a blog post with the title ‘what am I even good at.’ Math, you are good at math.
