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I was listening to a podcast today as I made the slow, long trip home on the bus in the rain - let me just say, I live about 10 minutes from Sydney’s downtown, just across the Harbour Bridge, but when it rains, people here forget where their accelerator pedal is and the trip takes like 45 minutes.
Anyway, I decided to soothe my rage about the commute traffic by listening to a couple people talk about running online businesses for 40 minutes or so.
I know right, some people listen to Dan Carlin’s “Hardcore History” or Sarah Koenig’s “Serial”, but I listen to people talk about running website businesses… Yikes.
During the podcast, the one guy was talking about how he only works on the things in his businesses that are in his “sweet spot” and play to what he casually referred to as his, “superpower”.
Being who I am, I was intrigued by what this human thought his superpower was - did he have an Adamantium skeleton and regenerative healing powers like Wolverine or was he more of a concussive force-beams from the eyes, Cyclops style, sort of dude?
Sadly, he overpromised and underdelivered on the superpower front.
Misunderstanding Your “Skills”
This chap’s stated superpowers were that he was “empathetic”, “a big picture person” and that he was more valuable on “strategy” and “meeting with his team”.
As he described his special abilities, I let out an audible little laugh on the bus that was loud enough to stop the young guy next to me from swiping on Tinder momentarily - “Yeah bro, I saw you swipe right on “Kendra - 24” from Kirribilli.”
Getting back to our podcast guy, let’s be honest, his actual superpower is that he’s managed to deceive himself into believing that he’s adding value by not doing anything.
Being empathetic with your staff and being pie in the sky with your business ideas isn’t a superpower.
How do I know?
Because he kept talking about how often he had failed and how many half baked ideas he’d sunk time and money into.
Literally, he was talking about swinging at 100 pitches and hitting 1.
Sorry, you don’t end up in the Hall of Fame with a .010 batting average - in fact, that probably doesn’t even qualify you to sell hot dogs in the stadium.
He’d placed this extremely high value on these meaningless soft skills and wasn’t really identifying what he was probably good at.
Managing Is An Undervalued Talent
This guy on the podcast was obviously just a really solid manager of people.
He’d found a way to bring his personality to bear on his business in a way that resonated with his staff and motivated them to work diligently for him.
Getting the most out of the people who work for you on a consistent basis and keeping them happy and motivated is genuinely an undervalued talent in business today.
You hear stories of these idiot savant technocrats with the social skills of a mollusk becoming billionaires and that sounds great, but the truth is, as organisations grow beyond a certain size they are often only successful if there are good leaders in positions of authority.
You’ll know this from your own experience probably.
If you’ve ever worked in a company or business where the management are inspirational, you’ll know that work ends up feeling important and empowering.
On the other hand, if you’ve worked in a place where your colleagues are super talented but the management layer are underwhelming, you’ll be familiar with how there’s always a sense of snatching defeat from the jaws of victory amongst the staff.
You Need To Be More Than Inspiring Though
I’m going to venture off here into an analogy that I’m ill prepared for, but this is my story, so you’re getting it anyway.
In rowing, there’s a coxswain - this person’s job is to call out the stroke pattern and keep an eye on the field.
They need to know exactly how much their team can give and then try to time it perfectly in relation to the finish but also against where the other boats are.
A good coxswain can make an average team great and a great team average.
But it takes more than yelling loudly and saying nice things to the crew to be a good coxswain as I’ve already describe.
Holy moly, I am going to end that analogy right there because despite my near zero knowledge of rowing aside from being an expert every four years during the Olympics, I think I made the point vividly enough that it had meaning!
Basically, it’s not enough to be inspiring, you have to have some actual talent as well.
The Best Leaders Pull The Rope
I have a pretty solid rule with most of my own online business stuff that I adapted from my professional career - I want to be proficient enough in the things my staff do that I can understand what they are talking about.
Or when they are trying to BS me.
If you’re completely ignorant about a topic, you’ll have almost no idea whether people are telling you the truth.
Case in point, I know less than nothing about cars. If I take my car to the shop and the mechanic says my flux capacitors are out of alignment, then I’m probably going to be paying to get my dilithium chamber re-aligned because I have no idea whether he’s just snowing me or not.
Couple of small Star Trek jokes there, BOOM!
For me, the way around that has always been to at least try my hand at most things that people who work for me do.
I’ve managed graphic artists, web designers, software developers, accountants, lawyers and even graduate civil engineers.
I’m not going to be able to design a freeway or build the tolling software for it, but I know enough about each of the underlying skills around both to manage people who can do those things.
In my online businesses, I pretty much can do every single task if I had to.
Create sites, troubleshoot web servers, make simple graphics, write content, do SEO, handle the books, wire up shopping carts…
I can, end to end, do everything… if I had to.
And if there are people working for me who are struggling, they will see me standing next to them, pulling the rope along with them.
Being A Top-Notch Generalist Is A Superpower
We live in a world where expertise is being commoditized at an increasing rate and exceptional generalists have become rarer.
When you see highly functional teams now, you’ll see that they have groups of specialists and experts, but the best teams will have these superstar generalists who are like the glue binding everything together.
I’m glue. That’s my superpower.
Whether it’s in my career, my businesses or anything else I participate in, I always try to be the person that can do a bit of everything in a proficient way and at the same time, compliments everyone else and makes them better.
If I’m working on a project in my job, I review the detailed designs from the network engineers and challenge them on how they meet requirements.
In my online businesses I’ll talk to content creators about ways to better optimize their work for search or how they can make the content flow better.
In social settings, I’m the person sitting at one end of the table that has interesting anecdotes so that people can escape mingling small talk and just have a chat with someone away from the crowd to relax.
I try to do a lot of different things really well, but I rarely aim for “expert level” attainment.
I like to think of myself as a much better looking, wittier, more charming, less earnest version of Captain America (suck on that Chris Evans) as opposed to the useless Hawkeye.
Do You Have A Superpower?
I’m pretty big on self-awareness - it’s vitally important if you’re going to be successful at anything in life, to be able to be reflect on yourself in an honest way.
If you were to look yourself in the mirror right now, what would you say your superpower is?
Are you like the guy from the podcast that says a bunch of stuff that makes him feel good about himself, but are rather ineffectual, whilst simultaneously missing his actual strengths?
Or can you layout quickly what your biggest attributes are and identify how you can utilize them to move yourself forward?
Being able to make this assessment is critical.
If you can’t establish what you’re really good at then you will struggle to objectively identify how best to make progress towards your goals.
I suggest you spend the time, do a bit of honest introspection and figure it out.
Some Housekeeping…
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