The other morning I was listening to everyone’s favorite silicon valley analyst Ben Thompson on his highly entertaining Sharp Tech podcast. Ben was dissing out what advice he tells people most to be successful: Do what you’re good at. Ignore everything else and outsource the rest.
There’s something inherently appealing about this. You were born with — or built through tenacity — a certain number of gifts. Ben is clearly an outstanding & speedy writer, and clearly a voracious & fast reader — his interest in technology cross-pollinated with his skills have made him not only successful, but deeply influential. No one worth their salt inside the industry doesn’t know about Ben, and his missives and theories influence not just the largest of board rooms, but the halls of government. Ben’s advice sounds good so far! Ben is using his gifts.
As for my gifts, it was apparent from a very early age that I was strong art & design. It has opened so many doors for me (got me into the nation’s top architecture school, allowed me to break into tech, etc.). Here’s the catch though:
I hate it.
Ok, so I don’t hate design, I actually deeply love it — and am very grateful I have taste and can implement it in a variety of mediums. The problems with gifts though is they can often times have no correlation to your goals. I don’t want to be a great artist, architect, etc — those goals do not inspire me whatsoever.
So what are my goals? I love building things — mainly businesses — and the goals of those businesses, if we can speak freely, is making as much money as possible. Sure. You can build a design agency (I have!), you could produce art and sell it at scale, you could found an architecture firm, etc — all of these align with my gifts — I just find those business either time consuming, hard to scale, or just too competitive*
So what do you do when your gifts and goals don’t correlate? This is your gift-goal gap. What are mine? Jesus, how much time do you have? But here are the big ones:
- Sales & Marketing: Generating and converting new & existing business
- Delegation: Offloading work to people with different gifts than yours
- Finance: Understanding how to manage & invest cash
I’m weak at every one of those — and I am working on them! — but they are the gap between me & my goals. So I could triple-down on my gifts or get working (and frankly, out of my comfort zone) on my gift-goal gap if I want to ever achieve anything I set out to.
Ben would have never achieved what he has without learning new skills. Ben has a podcast, Ben is effective at Twitter, Ben has employees, Ben has 10’s of thousands of subscribers that he has to manage & engage. None of these have to do with being a great writer. But he had to learn them, or he wouldn’t be where he is today.
Go find your gap and conquer.
Janicki.
* There are many people who want to pursue their gifts, driving costs down