As tends to happen just preceding one of my blog posts, I
read a very interesting post from another blogger a few weeks ago (hooray for
stealing other people’s thoughts!). The
blogger is Erika Andersen, a business-owner who consults with top business
professionals around world about various topics surrounding people management
and leadership within the business world.
I follow her posts regularly because there is so much insight into the
way businesses SHOULD be run and often aren’t.
Anyways, this particular post was a little more personal in
nature. She was discussing the way to
discover your career “sweet spot”. One
element of this is discovering your individual “superpower”. This is a difficult thing to define because you have to
minimalize your various talents and wittle them down to one very basic
skill. For example, she describes her
superpower as this: “I’m uniquely good at understanding the essence of a thing
and expressing it simply and clearly.”
Here’s the post, it’s worth a read if you have the time (and much shorter and more concise than mine!): http://www.forbes.com/sites/erikaandersen/2012/09/26/heres-a-simple-formula-for-finding-your-career-sweet-spot/
Her post goes into more detail, then adding “What drives
your economic engine” and “What are you passionate about” to the formula. But I want to focus on this “superpower”
piece because I think this is the most difficult thing to identify, and often
the most crucial to a person’s success.
Throughout my career journey, searching for an answer to
this question of my “superpower” has been particularly intriguing. It requires a lot of self-reflection and
self-watching. I know that sounds weird,
but noting how you act and react during certain tasks, and which situations in
which you find the most joy are very helpful exercises in working this out. There was something particularly difficult
about my “superpower”, and I’m guessing most people run into this same
conundrum: the activities I enjoy the most, and where I excel the most seem to
have very little relation to one another.
Here is a list of a few tasks that I’ve noticed I’m especially good at:
Songwriting
Analyzing and
interpreting graphs and charts
Building marketing strategies
Understanding the root of others’ challenges and
difficulties
Poetry
Developing business ideas (large and small)
Huh… Well, that’s a little strange. Songwriting and analyzing/interpreting
graphs and charts??? That makes no sense
at all!! For a long time I thought all
these skills were basically unrelated and that maybe I’m not as good at them as
I seem to think I am.
Well, I think I figured it out. And I hope that this story and detailed (heh
heh) explanation can help you do the same because I would be VERY interested to
know others’ superpowers and see them come to optimal use in your life as
well. My superpower:
“I am uniquely good at taking many pieces of information
from a variety of sources and mixing & melding them to create an interpretation
or idea that takes into account all relevant parameters.”
Ok, that’s a bit of a mouthful. I’m hoping I can condense that more over
time, but let’s look at that in the context of two of the earlier-mentioned skills:
Analyzing marketing
data requires taking in the information presented by various charts and
graphs, looking for trends and upsets, and interpreting it or creating a basis
for a marketing strategy that also takes into account many other factors
including the performance of past campaigns, common customer complaints,
available resources, and the complications of execution. Quite a few variables!
Songwriting, on
the other hand, though generally seen to be the creation of something
completely new out of nothing, but it is actually more of a process of
combining all kinds of different information: feelings, styles and genres of music,
instrumental capabilities, theory of chords and rhythms, words read and spoken
on a daily basis, stories, general
cultural interpretation of what “sounds good”, right down to the sound of a car
driving by or the feeling of sitting in the forest alone. All these things must be mixed and melded and
combined to create one piece of art.
Kinda cool, right? The
coolest part of this is that since I’ve recognized this and started to wield
this skill more and more, I’m seeing some great results. My boss has commented on more than one occasion
that I’ve got a great eye for catching trends and upsets in marketing data that
others don’t see. I’ve always gotten
decent compliments on my songwriting. I’ve
been invited regularly into brainstorming sessions at work. I simply feel better and I feel like people
are starting to work with me on achieving the career direction that I want!
So what’s your “superpower”?
If you already know it, please share it!
If not, challenge yourself to pay a little more attention to what you’re
exceptionally good at and what common skills can be pulled from all your
various talents. I guarantee it will
build your confidence and your ability to achieve your goals – you won’t regret
it!
