What Do You Do Best?
I spent last week traveling for work, and as a result, had the opportunity to read a tremendous book about basketball coach Bob Hurley, the legendary coach of St. Anthonys in Jersey City, NJ. The book is called The Miracle Of St. Anthonys and is an absolute must-read. You can get it from Amazon or your local library. You can also watch a new movie about Coach Hurley’s life and work.
The book chronicles a season with Coach Hurley in which his team won ( yet another ) NJ state championship. While the basketball story alone makes this book compelling, the one thing that I took away from the book is that Coach Hurley is a man who is doing what he was born to do. He has turned down opportunity after opportunity to go elsewhere and make millions of dollars because, in his estimation, there is no other work more important than coaching at this very small, cash-poor Catholic school.
The discipline to take the opportunities that fit us best is extremely rare. The lure of more money, more prestige, and just more generally often draws us away from the thing that really makes us tick. Almost every company sets up their ladder of advancement so that people move out of what they were really good at to something they hate. I wrote about this a while back. I know that I have taken posts at companies in the past simply because it was the route offered by the company where I was working.
When I say that out loud, it just sounds absurd. Why would I take a job that I know I won’t be any good at? Certainly some of the reasons are the ones I just mentioned. However, I think the bigger, more important reason is that most of us don’t really know what we are good at. Or, we know, but we can’t articulate it and make it the lens through which we evaluate what we are going to do.
I bet most of us have had people in our lives that have tried to tell us what we are good at. Often times it comes in the form of negative comments. “Why can’t you finish what you started?” “You just plod along, don’t you see that there are opportunities here we should be exploiting?” We often see these things as character flaws that we must work on. We spend hours and weeks and months trying to get better at things we hate to do because the job or class we have taken demands it. Seems kind of backwards, doesn’t it?
What if, instead, we simply acknowledged that we are wired a certain way and that the way we work or study or play best is not necessarily the way it’s written up in the manual. What if we instead evaluated each opportunity we have in light of what we understand that we are good at? It seems like a much more sane way to make decisions.
If you are good at doing lots of different things, and not necessarily finishing them 100%, then make sure you have someone around you that you can hand stuff to when it’s time to complete it. If you are not great at coming up with that next idea, but really like making sure that next idea actually gets done, align yourself with someone organizationally that is great at coming up with ideas and feed off of them.
Coach Hurley was made to coach high school basketball, and in particular was made to coach basketball at St. Anthonys. He can’t imagine doing anything else anywhere else, and his decisions at each possible fork in the road reflected the fact that he knows it.
Do you think you know what you are good at, and if so, are you doing that 80% of your time? If not, what would it take to change it?
