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What are you good at?

So here's a thought experiment...

When I built up Ministry of Testing I knew within myself where my deficiencies and constraints lay. Instead of trying to fix those deficiencies, I chose to focus in on doing things that I thought I was good at, or at least I wanted to get good at.

In hindsight, this was probably critical to my success.

I was good at listening. At bringing people together. At connecting the dots. At understanding the change that was needed. At seeing sparks within people. I was on top of the industry and where it was going. I could spot trends and rode the waves. I was not scared to experiment, time, and time again.

I was and am definitely not good at other things, which I won't mention here only because I want this post to be about what we are good at. I will happily discuss my flaws elsewhere to anyone who is willing to listen. 🤣

So, let us try this together:

  • What are you good at and enjoy doing?
  • What are you building, or planning to build?

My hope is that as a community we can help each other out by suggesting ways of growing a business that focuses in on their strengths.

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    What are you good at?
    I'm still figuring out what I'm good at by doing multiple projects.

    • Managing/overseeing anything anywhere
    • Being resourceful
    • Spotting people's potentials and helping them to realize their potentials
    • Starting something (I'm a natural starter)

    What are you building, or planning to build?

    • I'm building Do² Digital (www.do2digital.com), a tech publication that focuses on VR, Games, and How-to. My long-term goal is to create a community for average users who needs tech to automate/improve their workflow and daily life. They don’t know where to start learning due to the complicated information and fancy tech jargon. I focus on user-friendly language like ELI5 (Explain Like I'm 5).
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    • I'm good at UI sense. I can find any wrong margin/padding, can see if your fonts look good etc. UI nerd.
    • I'm okay with programming
    • I'm okay with communication

    I'm building Pingr - contemporary uptime monitoring service

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    I'm very good at manipulating and understanding numbers
    I'm good with details and understanding concepts
    I'm good at programming

    I'm building a career in Data Science.

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    I'm good at web development, SEO content marketing, listening to others problems and concerns.

    I'm learning to be more empathetic. I believe empathy will allow me to tell the right story. Storytelling is powerful.

  5. 1

    Love this thread!

    What are you good at?
    Balancing business requirements with technical limitations and design.

    It took me a while to figure out what I was actually good at, but I have always loved creating stuff. At the software company I worked at, I realized a lot of developers were really good at the engineering side of the job, but would sometimes get caught up spinning their wheels on something not that important. I think understanding what parts of the business requirements are able to be pushed back on is a super valuable skill for a software engineer. I think this skill is what will help me be an effective founder one day (I hope).

    What am I planning to build?
    I've had a goal of starting my own business for several years now. I am currently designing and launching digital board games at [Mobo Games] (https://gomobo.app), which has been really fun. But my long term plan has always been to launch this first business and learn the pain points of launching a small internet business. With that experience in my belt, I'd like to eventually launch a business to help others successful start or run their own business.

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      This comment was deleted 3 years ago.

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    Thanks for this. I love this idea. I'm good at seeing the potential in people. I've been told by my podcast guests that it's easy for them to feel at ease when they're speaking to me. That I'm good at giving them space and time to express themselves. And I know how to ask questions that other podcast hosts wouldn't ask.

  7. 1

    What are you good at and enjoy doing? I've had to survive for so long with limited resources and almost no external input or help that it's become second nature to create something out of nothing.

    While I'm good at solving problems (most of what I'm doing and have done is that), pride and satisfaction aren't the same as enjoyment, but it's at least near enough to count for something.

    What are you building, or planning to build? I like to help others, and I have a chance to help people who're struggling with the same problems I was.

    Research is more than shoving things in folders and adding a bunch of tags, so I built the Under Cloud to be the second brain Evernote was supposed to be but isn't, and I'm getting there … on limited resources!

  8. 1

    Really great & positive post @rosiesherry - nice to see

  9. 1

    I'm good and enjoy:

    • Writing (better in my mother tongue but improving in English).
    • Explaining / sharing.
    • Learning / understanding.
    • Programming.
    • Analyzing / understanding / solving problems.

    Easy to see that I want to go into mentoring / teaching, and it's what I'm doing already. It's a crowded space (especially in computing), but I'm experimenting anyway. Who knows, maybe it will bring me somewhere else?

    I have many flaws as well, for the record 🤣

  10. 1

    I am trying to understand myself better, but I know that my analysis is biased. I am also very cautious of evaluations of self strength and weakness where the weakness part is carefully crafted to be another part of propaganda about how great one is. So honest conversations about this are quite rare, even in private, let alone on public internet.

    A good rule of thumb I think is that we have traits of characters, and the same trait brings strength and weaknesses. For a trait of character to be significant, the opposite trait of character should be acceptable, and brings strength and weaknesses too.

    I will try the exercise you propose though. I think I am an 'optimizer', as opposed to an 'innovator'. So I can be very good at taking an existing area, cut all the waste, and go through tedious cycles of incremental improvement until things are just optimal. I find actually a lot of pleasure in those cycles of incremental improvement.

    This is why my current project ( Open Lowcode already 2500 hours invested in it) is trying to do just that for an area (enterprise software) where I think most radical innovation is behind us, and we just need people to optimize and cut the waste.

  11. 1

    I'm actually a Techie but I really enjoy and am surprisingly good at Project/Product Management and Customer service. I really love the operations side of things and connecting with people a lot! I've kinda ditched the technical side and kinda have some anxiety about going back to it 🤣

    Currently working on an ebook for data newbs and building a support site that combats loneliness :) I've got a tonne of ideas but I'm working on getting through each one with a swift build and obviously asking for support here!

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    This comment was deleted 4 years ago.

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    This comment was deleted 3 years ago.

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      Cool idea! Just one minor detail about the landing page: When you read it on an iPhone 11, everything below the animated headline keeps jumping up and down in the rhythm of the animation. I think the rest of the page should stay stable. Otherwise: Nice!

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        This comment was deleted 3 years ago.

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    This comment was deleted a year ago.

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