What's Your Superpower?

I’ve recently been meeting with many of my faculty members to discuss career development topics. One thing that struck me this year is that I feel like I’m having the same conversations with faculty every year, but nothing seems to change. I finally realized that, instead of just repeating myself and, to be honest, making little headway, I needed a new approach. Academic medicine is somewhat unique compared to other professions because promotion explicitly depends on building a reputation. Promotion guidelines literally specify, “Does this individual have a regional, national, or international reputation?” But even outside academia, I think most people, regardless of profession, care about their reputation and want to know how to build it. But after hundreds of conversations with faculty, I’ve realized the barriers are twofold, and I haven’t been addressing them adequately. It’s not just a lack of understanding of what needs to be done; more importantly, I think many people have an inherent aversion to the topic, which further hinders the transition from contemplation to action.

We first have to address the elephant in the room. For many people, this entire discussion feels uncomfortable and incongruent with their core values. Hence, we must address the “why” before we get to the “what.” While yes, some people crave the spotlight, many would really prefer to do good work and hope that will be enough. Just mentioning this topic makes many people cringe. Self-promotion feels uncomfortable, especially for physicians. To be honest, I only started engaging with social media because my publisher essentially told me I had to. So I think the key insight is to reframe the goal first. Whether we care about “reputation” or not, deep down most of us hope our work will have an impact. We want our ideas, discoveries, or inventions to travel beyond our immediate circle and make the world a little better. This is why many of us do our jobs in the first place. And when framed this way, perhaps the reason “reputation” matters becomes clearer, and the entire conversation becomes more comfortable. The goal isn’t really personal recognition. The goal of building a reputation is to extend your work's reach and impact. Just like it’s always easier to ask for something on someone else’s behalf than your own, let’s think about this exercise as doing something on behalf of your ideas, rather than yourself.

Assuming I’ve now got you on board, or at least curious, we can move on to what I view as the first step: figuring out what you actually want to be known for. After all, it’s hard to build a reputation around something if you haven’t first figured out what that something is.

A few years ago, I spoke with a faculty member who was concerned she was ill-equipped to frame herself as an expert on topic X. Many others she could name knew more about the topic than she did, so she felt a bit lost. I pushed her to think differently. Rather than asking whether she knew more about X than everyone else, what did she actually do particularly well? It may not be the topic itself, but a unique skill related to how she works in this space. Where did she bring unique value? Could she build her work and future presentations around that?

While we all identify with what we do, our field or job title. But I think it’s more important, and a lot more interesting, to first identify our individual core strengths. Your expertise tells people what you know. Your core strength helps them understand why they should seek you out specifically.

I can use my own story as another example. At the beginning of the pandemic, I appeared on Freakonomics Radio to talk about lungs and ventilators, which ultimately led to Breathing Lessons, my book about lung health. The opportunity came when I explained a complex topic, and I thought that might be where my core value lay. But over time, I realized my strength might be more nuanced than that. I am even more interested in how to break down complex topics to find hidden drivers, often the ones driven by human nature. Once I reframe the problem, the real solution becomes obvious.

I’ve applied this formula over and over in very different settings, whether that's trying to understand why so many patients with lung disease go undiagnosed or, as in this post, helping people think through their career development. The topics seem disparate, but my approach is similar. The more you understand your underlying strength, the more other people begin to understand what you uniquely bring to the table.

So how do you find your own core strength? I do not pretend to be an expert. One of the real experts on this topic is Gay Hendricks, who writes about it in his book The Big Leap. In it, he describes four zones in which we spend our time, but the distinction I find most interesting is between the Zone of Excellence and the Zone of Genius.

Your Zone of Excellence is the bucket of things you’re extremely good at. You may have spent years developing these skills. The better you get at them, the more people ask you to do them. This is a particularly easy trap for successful people. If you are good at something, you’ll probably get asked to do a lot of it, and you can build an extremely successful career doing things in your Zone of Excellence.

But Hendricks argues that your Zone of Genius is different. It is the intersection of the things you most love doing, that come unusually naturally to you, and where your effort seems to create disproportionate value. He argues that if you can spend as much time in your Zone of Genius as possible, you’ll be happier and more fulfilled. The challenge is that these abilities may be difficult to recognize precisely because they don’t feel particularly difficult.

We tend to assume our Zone of Genius, or superpower, should be something impressive. But in fact, it may feel almost ordinary to you. And importantly, your expertise is probably not your superpower. You may be a doctor, a lawyer, or a scientist specializing in X, Y, or Z. Those descriptors tell people what you do or know. They don’t necessarily tell them what you do unusually well.

A physician might think of himself as an intensivist. Yet what distinguishes him is actually his ability to make good decisions with incomplete information. In another case, a lawyer may specialize in complex litigation. But her real strength is finding the one argument that changes how everyone sees the case. While teaching may be the identity, what makes her exceptional is recognizing exactly where a student became lost and finding another way in. The core strength isn’t really specific to the work. It’s specific to the person.

So how do you figure out yours? Hendricks suggests paying attention to what you love doing most. Where does a relatively small amount of your effort seem to produce an unusually large result? Among the questions he suggests thinking about are:

“What do I most love to do?”

“What work do I do that doesn’t seem like work?”

“In my work, what produces the highest ratio of abundance and satisfaction to the amount of time spent?”

“What is my unique ability?”

Once you understand what you do unusually well, you can start making different choices about where to spend your time. Ideally, that also means spending more time doing work you find genuinely fulfilling. And over time, people will begin to associate you with that particular ability. A problem comes up, and someone thinks, I know exactly who we should call. That is the beginning of reputation. Many talented people exist in every profession. But reputation isn’t simply about being known. It’s about being known for something, which starts with understanding what you uniquely bring to the table.

Finding your zone of genius gives you a way to be more intentional about your career and spend more time focusing on activities that bring you joy. When you seek out work that draws on what you do unusually well, you will spend less time on things you are merely good at, and create more opportunities for others to see the particular value you bring. Then, building a reputation isn’t simply about getting more people to know you. It’s about giving them a reason to think of you. And when the right people know what you uniquely bring to the table, your ideas and your work can travel further than they ever could otherwise.