"I could do it all again tomorrow!"
I was on the phone to my wife after delivering a two-day workshop. The taxi's heater slowly defrosted my feet, and the snow-covered farmland glowed orange under the sunset. My body was spent, my voice hoarse. I needed a sleep. Yet I was energised. Pumped, even.
This was unusual. I had been thinking that delivering workshops wasn't my strength, just a necessary part of my work. I planned to take the rest of the week off to recover because this one was bigger than most, and workshops always drained me. But something about this one was different, and not just for me.
The feedback I normally got from workshops was about a 7 on the NPS scale. Good, competent, even helpful, but never generating raving fans. This time, multiple attendees told me it was the best workshop they'd ever attended. My sponsor hugged me. They loved it so much they brought me back for the next one.
And I felt like I had more energy deep inside me when I finished than when I started. No wonder it went well!
And yet, I didn't feel like I'd done anything particularly special or used what I thought was my own unfair advantage, my intelligence. I'd taken an easier route, relaxed into my role, focused on how I was making them feel, not what I was teaching them.
The smart one
I'd always been "the smart one". At University, my friends and I would wait for the exam results to be posted on the noticeboard, checking them together to find our names among the 300 or so undergrads who did well enough in school to be admitted to the most competitive Engineering school in my state. Despite barely studying, my name was always in the top five, along with Brad and Sam. They had both been in their state newspapers for coming top in their state high school exam results. They were smart, and maintained a disciplined study schedule. I slept in, arrived at lectures late, took scrawled notes that I couldn't read later, went for bike rides and talked to friends instead of studying for exams, and still kept up with them.
Obviously, my competitive advantage was my brain.
I could do anything, if only I applied myself to it (this turned out to be harder than I thought, which we'll talk about later). My career continued in the same vein. I moved to London and worked for a big investment bank, earning more money than I thought was reasonable all because I was smart. Then I got my dream job at Google - and for the first time, didn't stand out for being smart, because pretty much everyone was smart. I enjoyed working there. At least, I enjoyed being at work there. The work itself was still a drudge, even if it was fairly easy when I applied myself to it.
Almost twenty years later, I was still trading on my intelligence. Startups, Amazon, consulting. The grey matter between my ears was where the value was. My body was an inefficient input/output channel which I largely ignored (I weighed over 145kg, or 320lbs, at my heaviest), and my emotions were an inconvenience that sometimes got in the way of my rational thoughts - an impediment to be conquered. And this was before AI had started to eat the "intelligent" jobs. My intelligence was still a credible competitive advantage that should have led to untold riches.
I pushed myself to not waste the advantage I had been born with, working late sometimes, persisting on the things that wore me down, and as my Mum taught me, getting back on the horse every time I fell off.
I burnt out.
Twice.
The first time, I blamed it on Amazon. The second time, I was independent, and had nobody to blame except myself. I also had an ADHD diagnosis around the same time, which was opening me up to the need to reassess who I was.
Two workshops, two different results
The biggest insight for me came from comparing two workshops I ran.
One I did in Paris for a major energy company. I didn't enjoy it, and by the end was completely exhausted and needed a few days to recover. This was typical for me running workshops, and I thought maybe I just wasn't cut out to run them.
The second, well, you know how it turned out. It was bigger, with 70 attendees, and I anticipated being proportionately more exhausted and set aside a week to recover. But they set it up a bit differently - I was in a marble atrium with a stage, a three-metre monitor behind me, and a Madonna-style microphone. So I channelled my inner Tony Robbins, and aimed to engage and inspire them more than teach them.
Two workshops, different approaches, different results in terms of my energy.
I had seen myself as a brain who happened to have some people skills. I thought those people skills were a commodity, and my intelligence was the unique value, my competitive advantage. But when I tried to make the most of my intelligence, I neglected the people around me, and lost energy because of it. Even when I was "successful", I didn't feel any sense of pride or achievement or pleasure from it, and my skill level was progressively brought down to mediocre by my energy level.
But when I focused on doing things that give me energy - for me, this is when I make people around me feel and experience something - the energy lifts my skills from perhaps average to pretty amazing. That's what worked for me, but it might not work for you.
How to find your unfair advantage
The way to figure out your own unfair advantage is to pay attention to the nuances of what sorts of activities energise you. It goes deeper than "extrovert" vs "introvert". It's more subtle than "I like solving technology problems". Find examples of when you've done things which seem similar on the surface, but one example energised you and one drained you. Figure out what the difference is, and in that distinction will be some insight that could be valuable to you to help you find your own unfair advantage.
Why is it unfair?
Not just because you're good at it, but because when you do it, you get more energy from doing it, so you'll naturally get better at it over time. Compare that to things you're good at but which drain you - eventually your abilities fall to your energy.
Your sources of energy are your unfair advantage.
Find them, use them, trade on them. You will win and love it (and it will won't feel like you have to fight yourself to do the work).
