To Stand Out: Skills and Luck in the Short Term, Character in the Long Run

Because personality determines whether you can truly enjoy and feel energized pursuing something in a particular field over the long haul.

Personality is about asking yourself: am I happy when I'm doing things right now? Some people love going to the same job, treating each day like a spring outing. They easily find their place in the team and feel right at home. Others feel like they're attending a funeral every time they go to work. That tells you something: the work might match their skills, but it doesn't match their personality.

Some people are cut out to charge ahead, leading the assault. Then another batch follows to hold the fort and handle maintenance-type work. Some folks don't actually enjoy the assault process. They might just be the best fit for breaking through in that moment. If you don't recognize that and keep assigning them that kind of work, their enthusiasm will gradually wear down.

We tend to project our own thinking onto others, but people are all different, and we can't really know what's going on in their heads. More often than not, we're just not on the same wavelength.

Theoretically, there are a thousand opportunities out there. I've done serious research on about a hundred of them and feel really confident about twenty. From those, I picked just two, because they were the ones from that group of twenty that aligned most closely with my own conditions. That's what it means to only do things you truly understand.