What are you uniquely qualified for?
Personal stories that humble me
There is always something you’re uniquely qualified to do. After all, each of us is unique in some way. And it literally starts from birth, so it’s exciting to stop and think about what that set you up to do successfully.
“The two most important days in your life are the day you are born and the day you find out why.”
-Mark Twain
As an investor, I’m always looking for people who are uniquely qualified to address the problem or opportunity they are going after. And it’s obvious why; it gives you an advantage over the next person who might come along to compete with you. But you might be surprised what qualifies for a great entrepreneur, and it might help you ask questions for yourself like: What are you so passionate about you can’t stop yourself from pursuing it? What have only you experienced in your life? Where do you lose yourself in flow ? (Read more in 
People First ) Finallly, what are you uniquely qualified for?
There’s no one answer, of course, and that’s good because there are a myriad of possibilities based on how you came to be who you are and what opportunities you see! There are some key attributes worth thinking through that will help you filter and screen.
Start by separating your experience from your ability, attitude, aptitude. And think of other key attributes, which I’ll try to highlight throughout this piece.
Experience
Let’s start with some contrary thinking and encouragement for you if you’re still young and relatively inexperienced.
When experience holds you back …
How many times have you heard things like, “we’ve always done it this way” or, “we’re used to this” or, “in my last job we did…” This can be great for rote tasks, but experience can get in the way when new challenges and opportunities present themselves.
For startups who want to make real breakthroughs, the key word in breakthrough is “break”. And if you really break stuff, you should find yourself in unchartered territory where experience could actually hinder you!
Just this last week when invited to one of my company’s product offsites, I found myself needing to be quiet as I saw young talented people, uninhibited by experience, at work inventing the future. And when one young woman who is a rising star told me afterward that she feared her inexperience, I laughed and told her I feared stifling her creativity!
“The future cannot be predicted, but futures can be invented.”
-Dennis Gabor, Nobel Physicist
When experience is essential…
Obviously if you’ve been working in a job or sector for a long time and your experience has built up to give you a special vantage point it can be a great distinction. The
really can set you up for success, and in some instances, there’s no substitute for it such as in a specialized domain. Personally I’m a big believer in pairing experience with fresh youthful thinking in my investments, but the key is enabling and empowering them both.
For example, I’m lucky enough to work on a board with a team that has spent their lives in the complex Telco space. They’ve engineered some of the most complex equipment that has to operate at carrier grade, with 5 nines reliability to attract big customers like AT&T. If you’re reading this on your phone, there’s a good chance the data that brought it to you travelled thorough some of their inventions. This is not a space that I’d recommend a first-time entrepreneur tackle.
Without deep experience of both how to solve their problems and how to manage the complex sales process, you’re at a major disadvantage. They too, however, are also learning as the industry has been disrupted by the cloud. So even here we have to be careful not to assume anything based on past experience, and one of the reasons this team will win again is that they recognize this and are bringing in fresh thinkers to challenge them.
1 in a Million?
In another example, the story is even more nuanced. For several years, I’ve been working with a brilliant innovator and entrepreneur who has literally spent his whole professional life building the largest open source project on the planet. Over a million people are involved today. Yet when he first started his project, he had zero experience, and open source itself wasn’t widespread, so there wasn’t much to study from, and experts were mostly self-proclaimed.
Indeed, I originally followed his work because I was still trying to learn myself. Furthermore, the project itself was creating a new market where no one could really have had much ability to predict the potential. (He recently told me that looking back, his “lack of experience” in that market was an advantage as he was not constrained or daunted by competitive approaches.) That’s again where other attributes come in. He for example shows vision, curiosity, humility, and many other great traits suited to leadership and entrepreneurship.
Ability
Everyone has a unique ability of some sort; whether it’s problem solving or seeing things differently or building relationships. We all have innate abilities or develop personal skills based on our environment. And the role of a great organization is to recognize or uncover and polish these gems. Then place them where they can be most impactful, fully appreciated and rewarded. All the while complementing others on the team. This is also where the role of 
Mutual Mentorship can be so important. Great mentors and coaches help uncover not only people’s abilities, but their passions, potential, and of course key attributes.
Attitude, Aptitude and Other Key Attributes
Early in my career I gave a chance to an 18 year old who was part of a team I was acquiring in one of my first businesses. I had very little experience myself, being in my early 20s. So it was pretty much the blind leading the blind! But I recognized in him some of the same attributes that drove me; in particular, he was hungry, with a very positive attitude. He also possessed something I never had, a natural confidence that I admired and saw could be perfect in sales. We started him in what in the early 80s was called “telesales”.
He quickly became one of the most successful inside sales people, and then in outside sales he went on to become the top salesperson at Symantec for five straight years as the business went public, and soared through hundreds of millions of dollars of revenue. During this time we kept promoting him until it was obvious that because of his aptitude, whatever job he was challenged to do, he would rise to the top. And even as the business itself scaled he outran us and became a great entrepreneur himself. He later became the CEO of a an exciting growing and global security business with top tier investors behind him.
I could tell this story for many of the great people and teams I’ve been lucky enough to work with. All of whom I’d be overjoyed to back over and over again, and not because of the experience they had but because of the attitude or aptitude or other key attributes that they showed. Particularly a hunger to learn, grow and make a difference. And just to keep it real, I’ll also say that those that appeared to “fail” at some point often had the last laugh as they proved that it was just learning, and went on to do bigger and better things. They usually showed two of my other favorite attributes in combination: Passion and Persistence. So even if you can’t figure out what you’re uniquely qualified to do yet … remember there’s #nomorefear only learning .
But what can you do to be smart about your learning? Even if you’re not an entrepreneur, start by looking at your “self”.
Self awareness and self respect - 3 reasons we need them…
Even if you don’t have self-confidence yet, develop self-awareness and self-respect for at least three reasons.
- The key is to learn and know your abilities so you find alignment with the opportunity to apply them, and you need to respect yourself and your abilities before you expect anyone else to do the same.
- To team with others it’s vital to understand who can complement you and vice versa.
- Last, but often most importantly, know your principles and values, so you can find a cultural fit. this is too often overlooked and in many instances is the key to sustaining a real connection for an enduring role.
As an investor, I’m lucky enough to see amazing founders all the time who are off the charts in some ability or other, but the best of them have developed their self-awareness to realize what they need. Money is usually the last thing they care about, and a close second is advice. And if that’s why people approach me, my guard is way up. Great entrepreneurs cut their own path and want a fellow explorer for the journey, so in everything I do with them I try to leave room for them to use their unique qualities as I’ve described above.
“Hire and promote first on the basis of integrity; second, motivation; third, capacity; fourth, understanding; fifth, knowledge; and last and least, experience. Without integrity, motivation is dangerous; without motivation, capacity is impotent; without capacity, understanding is limited; without understanding, knowledge is meaningless; without knowledge, experience is blind. Experience is easy to provide and quickly put to good use by people with all the other qualities.” - -Dee Hock, founder and former CEO of the VISA credit card association
From all this I’ve found that everyone is uniquely qualified for something. I encourage you to fully explore, enjoy and celebrate whoever you are. It will help you find what’s right for you. And don’t feel it’s got to be perfect - just keep fearlessly learning. These days that’s the only thing I know I’m uniquely qualified to do, as I now realize that the older I get the more I have to learn - and I love it!
You are not 1 in a million. You are 1 in 8 billion!
🎙 Hear how Michael taught it the lecture, cleaned & woven in
▶ Watch the original lecture
I’m going to ask you a really easy question: what are you uniquely qualified for? You’re all looking at me blankly. Let me give you the good news: you already know you’re unique. You are not one in a million, not one in a billion. You’re one in eight billion. You are unique.
So on your personal whiteboard, write one thing you think you’re uniquely qualified for. It might be based on your personal experience, a past job, something you were educated in, where you grew up, your family, or the way you’ve come through life. Don’t think too hard. Just pull out one word.
One person said “building.” He had real estate experience, but also, when working in teams, people told him he had a unique strength: when others come up with an idea, he helps refine and build on it. What a great example of something that feels unique but is personal to you. I guarantee that’s going to come up in your culture, because it’s authentic to who you are. This is how easy it is to start: look within and say what you’re uniquely good at.
Another said “connecting,” being good at connecting with people and connecting others together. As a manager, she had people come up under her who outperformed her, and part of that was connecting with them, finding their purpose, and investing in their individual goals. Whether you start something or join something, every startup needs you.
Somebody else picked “solving.” You hand somebody a problem they’re not sure can be solved, and they learn to break it down into smaller problems, because everyone can solve small problems. There’s never a day that goes by that I don’t have some problem to solve. If you can break it down into small parts and make it digestible, you’re going to be an awesome founder.
And one word on this exercise that people pay too little attention to in startups: grit. When the chips are down, your cultural strength comes through. These things are all connected to how you build your culture to sustain your business.
Now, an important question came up: what happens when you and someone else both think you’re unique in the same space? Two people in this room were both at the GSD; one had written “designer and artist” and assumed the other, also at the GSD, was a good designer and artist too. So let’s test it. Are you the same people? One used to be an architect; so did the other. But one is from India and one is from Korea. It wouldn’t take me long, with a handful of questions, to find out how different you are, and also how similar. Your background, in some shape or form, will cause you to see things differently and therefore design things differently. You just will. You don’t have to be better than somebody. You just have to be uniquely good at something you believe you can pursue to solve a problem or create an opportunity.
When you get together with your next two or three co-founders or hires, do this same exercise. Why? For consistency. Imagine you hired three people and didn’t check on the way in that they share your cultural values, and they’re not subscribed to something you really care about, like building, or connecting. It may not be a problem on day one, but it will become one. Picture how quickly a degree off course becomes a mile. Startups take, on average, seven to ten years to reach critical mass to go public. Seven to ten years down the road, if you’re culturally misaligned, you’ll be all over the place. So for your first three hires, you’d better get really clear that they share your values.
Somebody asked: is talking about values enough? Can you know someone’s values just by talking? Someone might say “yeah, I agree with that” and not actually feel it. And a student answered her own question beautifully: you’d have to make it less abstract. Instead of “do you believe in X?”, ask “if you were in this situation, what would you do?” That’s the essence of it. The essence of hiring is not to tell people your values, but to extract from them what they believe, why they believe it, and how they behave in situations. If you can come up with a question that draws that out, you’ll find out very quickly whether they think like you.