Benjamin Todd

Darwin, Lincoln, and Oprah all failed early in their careers, then went on to completely dominate their fields.

Albert Einstein's 1895 Schoolmaster's Report reads, He will never amount to anything.

Asking, what am I good at, needlessly narrows your options.

It's better to ask, what could I become good at?

That aside, the bigger problem is that these methods aren't reliable.

Plenty of research shows that while it's possible to predict what you'll be good at ahead of time, it's difficult.

Just going with your gut is particularly unreliable, and it turns out career tests don't work very well either.

Instead, you should be prepared to think like a scientist.

Learn about and try out your options, looking outwards rather than inwards.

Here we'll explain why and how.

Being good at your job is more important than you think.

Everyone agrees that it's important to find a job you're good at.

But we think it's even more important than most people think, especially if you care about social impact.

First, the most successful people in a field account for a disproportionately large fraction of the impact.

A landmark study of expert performers found that a small percentage of the workers in any given domain is responsible for the bulk of the work.

Generally, the top 10% of the most prolific elite can be credited with around 50% of all contributions, whereas the bottom 50% of the least productive workers can claim only 15% of the total work.

and the most productive contributor is usually about 100 times more prolific than the least.

So, if you were to plot degrees of success on a graph, it would look like this.

Here's a graph with workers in a field in order of success on the x-axis and the level of success on the y-axis.

It's the same spiked shape as the graph we've seen several times before in this guide.