Most career advice quietly asks you to become someone else.
Career notes
You don't need to become someone else to succeed
There is a hidden reason a career you worked hard for can still feel like someone else's. Most people never spot it, and the way out starts with what you already do best.
Deep down, you know what comes naturally and what you have to force. Somewhere along the way, that knowing got buried. By parents who wanted the best for you. By teachers who measured you against their metrics. By a society that handed you its definition of success and called it ambition.
That definition came with instructions, too. Be good at everything. Fix your weak spots. Follow the standard path. So you worked hard at being someone you're not, and you got good at it.
Call it borrowed ambition: chasing someone else's idea of success by becoming someone else. It looks exactly like the real thing. You can hit the goal and feel nothing. And a quiet voice keeps saying: this isn't me.
The way out: build on what you already do best
Call it a strengths-first career. It runs the other direction. Instead of fixing what you are bad at, you find the few things you do unusually well and shape your work around them. You stop forcing. You start from you.
Research backs this up. In a study that followed 207 people for six months, the ones who used their strengths more went on to report more energy and less stress (Wood and colleagues, 2011).
Why it is hard to see on your own, and how to start
Your best abilities are the hardest ones to spot. What comes naturally doesn't feel like a skill to you. It just feels like the way things are done. After years of other people's definitions, you need to see your patterns from the outside.
That is what Pigment is for. It shows you what you do best, so you can build your work around it.
Start with the Superpower Assessment. In about 20 minutes, you answer questions made to help you spot patterns you can't see on your own. You don't need to know what you're good at first. Finding out is the point.
What you get back shows you what you do best: the rare mix of abilities behind your best work, abilities that almost never show up together, but do in you. It shows you how to build your career around it. And it gives you practical words for it, the kind you can use in an interview, a promotion conversation or a negotiation, so the people deciding can see your value too.
That matters more than it sounds. How well you understand your own contribution, and can say it, is often the difference between a great career and an average one.
If you have done the workplace tests that hand you four letters or a color, this goes further. Those give you a label. This shows you what makes you rare, and how to use it. Executive coaches and New York Times bestselling authors helped build it.
It won't ask you to throw away the years you have put in. They are what you build on. It never pushes you anywhere, and it is just as useful in the job you already have.
You don't have to do it alone. There is a live 90-minute Zoom workshop, if you want it, where you walk through your results with real people, and a year in a community of people building their work around what they do best.
Borrowed ambition took years to build. Finding your own starts with twenty honest minutes.
So what do you do better than almost anyone, and is your work built around it?
Superpower Assessment
See what you do best, and build your work around it
- The rare mix of abilities behind your best work
- How to build your career around it
- Words to use in interviews, promotions and negotiations
- A live workshop and a one-year community
In Use At
