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Comment by spydez | Hacker News Reader

    "You’re uniquely good at them and you not quite sure why."

I don't know of anything like that... I know some stuff I'm pretty decent at, but there's thousands that are better than I am at each of them. So how can I "scale at what makes [me] great"?

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It's sort of a binary question, I think--if you're in a low-density job like "neurosurgeon," it's neurosurgery. If it's a high-density job like "Marine rifleman," it'll probably be something other than your basic job description. For variable density jobs, which could be anything from "rank and file code monkey" to "RMS," it's a true conundrum.

For the record, I'm still not sure of the answer, nor what I want to do when I grow up, although I'm enjoying network security.

Maybe think of it as uniquely good within your sphere of influence. I'm bottom of the bell curve in generic small talk when you dump me in the middle of a sales conference, but in the context of the IT department I work in, I'm usually put forward first to chat with customers.

I tend to think of it as the one-in-one-hundred trait. Given yourself and 99 other random people, what can you do that they probably can't?

That doesn't mean you're the best in your country, or in your field, or in the world, or whatever, it just means that you'll tend to be the best at a lot of small companies, and among the best at the larger ones.

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