Who, me? Find out who you actually are
You can't read the label from inside the jar — this interrogation surfaces what drives you, what drains you, and the strengths you can't see, recorded as facts you can build a strategy on. Adapted from Chapter 11 of Hidden Multipliers: To Thine Own Self Be True.
- Input
- Yourself, honestly — plus answers from a few people who know you well (the skill assigns them the outside-in questions).
- Output
- A WHO-ME.md led by 'The shape' — a synthesis of your most salient characteristics counterbalanced against each other — over the full map: each fact with concrete evidence and the contexts where it helps or hurts.
What this is about
The right strategy — for a product, a company, a career — is the one whose success hinges on things you already do exceptionally well and want to keep doing for years. But "know thyself" has been the hardest assignment for two and a half millennia: you're biased, you carry baggage, and you've spent years rehearsing who you think you should be. Meanwhile the most powerful facts about you are literally invisible to you — like the extrovert who drifts effortlessly through a party and can't explain "how" because for them it isn't a technique.
This skill runs the way out of the jar. It walks you through the book's self-discovery prompts (even when I was a kid, I would ___; whenever I ___, I get lost in the work and feel energized when it ends), then the anti-questions (when I'm faced with ___, I feel it in the pit of my stomach), and it assigns the outside-in questions as homework to people who know you — the perfect-scenario question, the personal-hell question, and the one that finds your edge: what are my strengths I can't see because they come so naturally?
It's an interrogation, not a survey. Every self-flattering label gets pressed for the concrete episode behind it. Sanitized motives get one mandatory pass of "and what's the less presentable version?" — money, fame, and proving a point are honorable answers here. And every finding lands in the file the way the book insists: not as a strength or a weakness but as a fact of your personality — "competitive" is a gift on a sales call and a curse in a team meeting — with the contexts where it helps and where it quietly ruins things.
Example invocation
You can invoke the skill like this:
/asb-who-me I'm deciding what company to start next, and I keep
picking ideas that impress other founders instead of ideas I'd
actually love running for a decade. Help me figure out who I am first.
The skill interviews you in short rounds — prompts, episodes, presses
— and builds WHO-ME.md as you go: your drives, your dreads, the
tensions between them, and homework for the friends who can see what
you can't.
One practical note: say where you're working. Name a directory (or point at your existing files) when you invoke, and the skill keeps the method's files together there — if you don't, it asks before creating anything.
From the source
Two sources form the foundation of this skill:
- As in Chapter 11 of Hidden Multipliers: To Thine Own Self Be True (sections "Finding Yourself" and "Outside-In") — hiddenmultipliers.com — the drive prompts, the anti-questions, the three outside-in questions, and the rule that attributes are facts whose strength-or-weakness expression depends on context.
- Pivot Points — the published system: why "strengths and weaknesses" is the wrong frame, the pivot-foot metaphor for building around your fixed facts, and when (rarely) to invest in changing one.
Supporting articles each supply a piece of the mechanism:
- Finding Fulfillment — the Joy/Skill/Need circles and their traps; the source of this skill's energized-or-wrecked check, which catches burnout hiding behind good results.
- Being who you are, while becoming better — the counterweight: embracing your facts doesn't mean you stop striving, and the "motor" itself is a characteristic worth recording.