Where Are Others Obtuse?: Noting Others’ Annoying Fumbles as THE Guide to Self-Knowledge
This is because talent does not feel like talent. Competence feels like the absence of difficulty others routinely encounter. Thus begin your “mental autocompletion” by complaining about the easy things that your coworkers routinely miss and fail to do, and what gap fill-ins you naturally supply. That inversion reveals your relative advantage. As a drafting trick, use AI to produce a strawman, recoil from its blandness and stupidity, and rewrite in your own voice. The goal is self-knowledge of where you might fit in some organization, where your skills reduce friction and create utility, repeatedly and predictably…
Looking at this again, because it was so excellent:
David MacIver: How to say what you’re good at <https://drmaciver.substack.com/p/how-to-say-what-youre-good-at>: ‘Most people I know struggle with is writing positive things about themselves…. Sasha Chapin: “Talent doesn’t feel like you’re amazing. It feels like the difficulties that trouble others are mysteriously absent in your case. Don’t ask yourself where your true gifts lie. Ask what other people seem weirdly bad at…”… Start… complaining about your… peers…. Why are they so bad at?… Why don’t they just…? Why do they need me to… (instead of doing it/figuring it out for themselves)? Rnt… over the top chewing the scenery… “Those fools! I’ll show them! I’ll show them all!” energy…. Once you’ve identified what everyone else is bad at, you can start asking the question: Are they? Or am I just good at it?… Tell people that you’re good at fixing things, or mentoring, or helping people think clearly, or whatever it is it turns out you’re good at…
I wrote about it before, in the context of how to use GPT LLM MAMLM-generated prose for good, as a spur to get you to “delete whatever drivel it wrote and write something better, because you can definitely improve on that…”:
But I am back because, as I said, it is soooo good:
David MacIver’s key: Talent doesn’t feel like brilliance; it feels like ease where others struggle. So diagnose that gap where your talents lie by starting with a rant—what seems “mysteriously absent” for others that comes naturally to you? Convert those irritations into concrete, testable claims about what you fix, prevent, or accelerate.
Plus: Name the invisible labor you absorb (coordination, mentoring, error catching). Invisible labor is the glue that keeps teams from stalling: the coordination that aligns calendars and dependencies, the mentoring that upgrades others’ judgment, and the error catching that prevents rework and reputational dings. In those areas in which you are the person who quietly lowers transaction costs every week, that is not “nice to have,” it is your comparative advantage.
Remember: Excellence feels like absence of friction, so become much more aware of friction—queue times, rework rates, meeting cycles, escalation counts, and so forth.
I do have one more thing to say that I think is relatively important, for excellence needs to be identified (and nurtured!) perhaps even more in a group and team context: