I can turn a phrase.

High school journalism is where I discovered this. Mrs. Wickett kept bringing stories to me in my junior year “Needs a clever headline.” I’d read the story and throw out a terse, clever headline.

No clue where this ability come from. If I actually think about how I pick the words and construct the idea, the ability vanishes. The less I know about it, the better.

I’ve been riding this talent for years. Turns out the ability to summarize isn’t only handy for writing headlines; it’s useful in meetings, too. “He just said that, you think this, let’s move on and stop saying the same thing over and over again.”

It was this appreciation of summarization that I took into my first executive product presentation at the last gig. 10th floor of corporate headquarters. Four VPs and their minions surrounding the table. My thought: Wow them with crisp, clean, and clever thoughts. Alliteration. Witty. Headlines.

So I did.

“This is the product. Here are the 20 clever phrases to describe it. Thank you very much!”

Silence. 30 seconds of awkward silence followed by the VP of Marketing breaking the tension, “What exactly are we reviewing here?” The next five minutes were less pleasant as the room realized I was done and all I’d accomplished was filling the air with clever alliterative phrases. There was no obvious strategy behind the headlines.

The Russian Lit Major was standing outside my door as I limped back from the beat down “How’d that feel?”

“Disaster.”

“Yeah, details bore the shit out of you and you suck at talking to executives.”

“… I what?”

I See Bell Curves

You are horrible at something.

You are a bell curve. A standard distribution. At one end of the curve, you have your talents. You’re naturally and uniquely good at them, but you’re not quite sure why. At the other end of the curve, you have your natural deficiencies and, while I am an optimist and I do believe you can learn your way through just about anything, you’re genetically predisposed to be pretty bad at these things.

Now, chances are you are a horrible at a whole bunch of things, but I want to focus on one thing. It’s the thing that will have the most impact on your career. By being bad at this thing, you limit your career growth.

I’m going to make a leap and assume that you’ve already identified your horrible. At some point in the past, you realized you were bad at this thing. “I am unable to read people.” “I love to program, but I am a lousy architect.” “I dress like a goofball.” Whatever your realization was, you become aware that you were deficient relative to the rest of the world, and you took one of two paths.

The first path: you structured your days and your life so that you wouldn’t stumble over this deficiency. Bad programmer, but deeply technical? Ok, you stuck with QA. Unable to read people? Ok, stick with code, don’t manage. Horrible fashion sense? Right so, you’re not first in line for customer visits. As path of least resistance strategies go, this can work. You can sit there and hide from the horrible, but my thought is, if you’re reading this weblog, you chose the other path and you attacked the horrible.

Your thought, “I refuse to suck at this,” so you took the other path and forced yourself to learn through the horrible.

Educating yourself in your deficiencies. Learning. Researching. Practicing. I’m a fan. There is nothing quite like the sense of accomplishment when you know that Darwin is rooting against you. I would go so far as to say that success at overcoming the horrible is far sweeter than success when you know what the hell you’re doing.

And yet… you still might suck at your horrible.

I Want More of You

Back to the Russian Lit Major lurking outside my executive disaster,

“Yeah, details bore the shit out of you and you suck at talking to executives.”

“… I what?”

“You have a product there, but your problem is that you believe that since you can see, everyone else can. They can’t. You need to stitch together the details of how you discovered the product and you need to say it in the language of executives. I’ll show you.”

That night, she took my presentation home and ripped it to shreds. The following morning she sat me down with a completely revised presentation and she walked me through it, slide by slide, pointing out that while I was making fine points, I was skipping over essential details the executives needed to hear. My thoughts were big, but they lacked meat and executive-friendly messaging.

It sucked. It’s one thing to know you’re horrible at the something, but discovery of this horribleness by the rest of the team is a whole other order of magnitude of embarrassment.

Except the slides were better. My messages were still there, but the deck made sense to someone other than me. Two weeks later when we presented again, the questions were enthusiastic, not problematic. I was saying the same thing, but the additions of the Russian Lit Major’s natural ability made my message clear.

Big Trust

There’s a defining moment in your career when you choose to trust someone beside yourself. I’m not talking about trusting them with the small stuff: “Hey, can you fix this bug for me?” I’m talking about big trust “Hey, your design sense is 10x mine, what the hell is wrong with this dialog? Be brutal.”

It’s tricky to leave that swell little island of you. It’s hard to suck up your pride and acknowledge there are those who excel where you suck. But whether you’re an individual or a manager, your job is to learn to scale at what makes you great. Yes, you want to fill your professional experience gaps, but if you work where I work, you’re in a hurry. Getting anything done requires a balance of your natural talent and your ability to find and leverage the talents of those around you.

By putting big trust in someone else, you’re solving three problems: you’re increasing the chance you’ll get your project done, you’re building a strong team, and, oh yeah, you get to watch and learn as someone deftly works in a place where you’re horrible.

By watching someone be great, you’ll learn just like I learned. I don’t need the Russian Lit Major for every presentation, but I know whenever I want to be great, I’ll go and find her.