Photo: Pheobe Philo via NYT
Nobody knows how to talk about themselves.
That reminder came to me this morning during coffee with a friend.
This friend (Chief Product Officer of a $100M+ fashion brand) is making hires. A lot of them.
He interviewed 50 designers last week. His top complaint about these candidates:
“I want to position them for success in the company. But when I ask them what their superpower is, they go silent, or start rambling. They have no idea how to answer the question.”
I’ll state the obvious:
Your superpower is what makes you effective in your role, but knowing your superpower is what lands you the role.
So if you would like to be among the elite few who can nail the answer to this question, here’s your framework in three bullets.
(These bullets sort of conflict with each other. Just go with it.)
1: DON’T OVERDO IT
People who have traveled the long, messy road to success love to look back and paint a nice tidy picture of it. They also love to stress the importance of pinpointing your strengths, defining your vision, knowing your "why", blah blah blah.
But this inherent desire to reverse-engineer the human talent recipe, this need for everything to make perfect sense in simplistic black and white, is a huge vibe killer.
You’re a complex work of art, capable of an incredible spectrum of things, for an unfathomable combination of potential reasons.
Ever notice how you can drive for months on expired tags, but the moment you realize they’re expired, you get pulled over?
You can ruin anything by overthinking. And over-talking.
“If you have to tell somebody what you are, you aren’t.” - Richard Stark
2: BE SURPRISING
All that said, you’ve got to (occasionally) be able say something about yourself.
But distilling years of experience and learning and POV into a sentence is hard. The reason it’s hard is because you’re trying to fit everything into that sentence.
That’s why you see LinkedIn headlines that say “passionate and results-driven professional with 14 years of experience leading teams cross-functionally while driving revenue and profit via dynamic, people-centric leadership style rooted in….”
Nobody knows how long that sentence goes on, because we all stopped reading it, and so did the hiring manager.
Why? Not just because it’s long and annoying, but because it’s the same sentence everyone else is using.
Instead, adopt the Naval framework: ask yourself “what feels like play to me, but looks like work to everyone else?”
Your superpower might not even be something you’re super good at — it might just be something you’re half decent at, while everyone else completely sucks at it.
Say it quick, and say it short. Leave some things unexplained.
If the response is “wait a minute… can you explain that to me?” you’ve done a good job.
3: DEFINE YOUR STACK
Your “thing” isn’t a thing, it’s a combination of things.
Almost nobody is the Michael Jordan of something. The real majority of successful people are the Scottie Pippen of 3-4 things.
You’re probably not the greatest designer who ever lived.
But if you’re good at design, know the basics of writing a concise email, have a unique framework for fast decision making, and make other people feel great about themselves… well now you’re swimming in a very small pool.
