Personal development

Accept that you are different

Most of us spend years trying to be a slightly worse version of someone else. The way out begins with an uncomfortable admission.

There is a particular kind of exhaustion that comes from competing in somebody else’s event.

I meet it constantly in people who are, by any measure, doing well: the accountant who wishes he were a natural in a room, the quiet one who has decided that quiet is a defect, the manager copying a predecessor whose style never suited her.

They are all working extremely hard to be a slightly worse version of another person, while the thing they are actually good at goes unattended.

The admission

You are different, and some of that difference is not going to change. That sentence lands as bad news for about a week. Then it becomes the most useful thing you know, because it lets you stop spending energy on the gap and start spending it on the ground you actually hold.

This is not permission to neglect a real weakness. If you cannot write clearly, learn to write clearly. But there is a difference between a skill gap and a temperament, and most people confuse the two for years.

Find the thing that is easy for you and difficult for others. Build there.

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