Of the countless frustrations experienced by grads, perhaps the one most expatiated on is skill. They spend 3-5 arduous years writing essay after essay all to have no fucking clue what they’re good at.

And that’s an issue.

What’s worrisome is that the most common approach to finding a good career is identifying your strengths and finding opportunities that match them.

But poor old grads have little data on what they’re good at, making them more likely to guess incorrectly, sending themselves down a pathway of misery.

Insert this email.

The anxious, seemingly useless grad needn’t worry any longer.

Because figuring out what you’re good at, or at least what you could be good at, isn’t as difficult as it may seem.

Gather Data

Start by sketching out your education, work history, and hobbies, then look for ‘bright spots’, times when things went unusually well or you produced unusually good results.

You will undoubtedly have some.

It’s worth noting that we often don’t notice our strengths, because what we’re good at feels easy and natural, while our weaknesses create headaches.

Use this. What things were easy for you that others found difficult?

Then, take things even further and look for times when you performed well compared to people with similar experiences to yourself.

This is key because a common pitfall is to focus too much on absolute performance. It often takes years and years to get good at something, so there’s no point comparing yourself to someone who has had more practice.

You want to find the skills for which within a cohort of similarly experienced peers, you rank highly.

Maybe at uni your writing was consistently above average. Or perhaps you thrive in customer-facing environments and loved presenting at school.

2. Reflect

Consider a few key questions:

1. What doesn’t feel like work but is?

If there’s one question to consider seriously, it’s this.

If anything stands out here, then there’s a pretty good chance you’ve got something that you could become exceptional at, which is arguably more important than finding whatever skill you think you presently have.

2. What’s your most useful career capital?

What are your most important relationships? Do you have strong ties with friends, collaborators, or mentors? Or are most of your connections weak ties to work acquaintances?

What are the best contributors to your reputation? Do you have exceeding educational qualifications? What about previous jobs? Have you built any projects or won any awards that indicate your level of competency and performance?

What resources do you have access to? How much financial runway have you built up? Do you have access to certain technologies or capital?

This is often the most overlooked aspect of personal strength.

3. Broaden Your Horizons

If you’re still stuck, then here’s a massive list of different personal strengths to comb through.

1. Work skills

The basics:

• Active learning/listening

• Critical thinking

• Science 

• Mathematics 

• Writing

Social skills:

• Coordination 

• Instructing 

• Negotiation 

• Persuasion

2. Personality traits

The most widely used way of classifying personality used in research is the Big Five. It breaks personality into the following five factors:

• Extraversion vs. introversion, which decomposes into enthusiasm and assertiveness.

• Conscientiousness, which decomposes into industriousness (i.e. being hard-working) and orderliness (following rules, being organised).

• Agreeableness, which decomposes into compassion and politeness.

• Emotional stability vs. neuroticism.

• Openness to experience and ideas.

3. Cognitive abilities

• Intelligence (splitting into verbal, quantitative, and spatial)

• Judgment

• Creativity

• Maybe some underlying aspects of social skills

After this, there’s not much more too it.

Cya.