Finding Your SuperPower (We All Have One)

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!