First Principle - Know Your Strengths

A startup, really any small organization, is a village. There are lots of ways to contribute. The key to unlocking yourself and, more importantly, everyone around you is to Know Your Strengths.

How?

First, here is a useful framework. Now, Discover Your Strengths introduced me to a method of understanding strengths by defining Skills, Knowledge, and Talents.

Skills are step-by-step processes.

Knowledge is expertise gained. It can be academic or experiential.

Talents are ingrained patterns.

Skills are rote. Think of a runbook or a How-To article. You do them a few times and can probably remember most of the steps.

Knowledge requires reading and/or experiences. Think about Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) on your team: people who have worked with some domain for a long time and can analyze and synthesize on that topic.

Although, Talents are different. They are not easily learned. You are either born with them, develop them young, or you habituate them deliberately as you age. They are ingrained physical and mental patterns. They are well-trod neural pathways. Think about the things you like to do when you're not working. Think about the ways that you interact with your friends and family. These are hints about your Talents.

Your Strengths comprise Skills, Knowledge, and Talents; your Talents have an outsized weight.

Why?

In your organization, you don't need to be good at everything, but you do need to be good at some things.

In a startup, Skills enable you to scaffold the product quickly by following patterns that you've trod before. Also, you bring up the entire team by teaching others useful tasks. However, since startups breed uncertainty, you will need to pivot quickly into untrod territory.

You may find that skills you've mastered in the past don't apply in the same way. Knowledge, e.g. as a SME in Marketing, Application Development, Security, etc., enables you to apply your expertise in novel ways as the organization swerves towards product-market fit.

However, leverage is what startups crave most: the ability to do more with less. Here, your Talents are your guide. Behind every famous startup story - a hacker building an operating system in a few days, a product visionary applying art to design, or a leader building a culture of Joy - are the Talents of those founders, because talents are a gateway to Flow State (more on this in a coming chapter).

A Story

Many years ago, I interviewed with a wonderful local company. The interviews went well, but we both agreed that the timing was wrong. During the process, the CEO of the company interviewed me. One of the questions stuck with me:

What is your superpower?

This question is powerful. MUCH more powerful than the benign "tell me your weaknesses" crap. Why? To answer this question properly, you must know yourself, at least well enough know the difference between tasks you've learned, subjects you've mastered, and things you just seem naturally good at. Your answer to the question should lean heavily into the things you're naturally good at because those are the things that make you special and give you leverage.

My Strengths

For this post, I'm only going to list two talents - just to give you an example to get you thinking about your own talents. I'm not going to list Skills and Knowledge because this is becoming uncomfortably like a resume. When thinking about talents, I find a framework useful to help me get started. I adapted these talents from the Gallup Clifton Strengths Finder. I used to cringe at these types of assessments. It is a business, and they are trying to sell you something; however, it is useful to have a starting point and to have a common pattern language when discussing these with others.

I am a Learner and a Connector.

1. My desire to learn outweighs my fear of failing. One of my unofficial jobs at CloudZero is to pepper Phil Pergola with questions in our weekly company meeting. I do this partly to encourage others to ask questions and partly to stay engaged, but mostly I do it because I'm interested in learning. One of the greatest benefits of working at a startup is direct access to many functional areas: Marketing, Sales, Product, Engineering, Operations ... oh my, so much to learn, so little time.

2. I am genuinely interested in people, and I want to make them smile. This seems like an odd talent, but I've felt it my entire life. When I was a kid, it manifested in interest in my teachers. I was always a decent student just on the material; however, I was always (well ... almost always, I failed in 5th grade) able to create a rapport with my teacher: to understand who they were, how they graded, and what they expected of me in the class. At work, I'm "glue". I get to know my colleagues, understand how they work best, try to put them in positions to succeed, and ultimately (and most importantly) I try make everyone laugh as often as possible.

tl;dr

Know Your Strengths and use them to raise everyone around you.