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Skills from A Smart Bear

Find Yourself

Pivot Points

Two skills, run in sequence, that turn an honest look at who you are into the one or two decisive advantages you bet your whole strategy on. Adapted from Pivot Points.

What this is about

The right strategy for a product, a company, or a career depends on things you already do very well. It must also be things you want to keep doing for years. It is the game you are built to win. Competitors misjudge this strategy because they judge the wrong player. But you cannot build a company in the shape of you until you know your own shape. "Know thyself" has been the hardest task for two and a half thousand years. You cannot read the label from inside the jar. You are biased. You rehearse who you think you should be. Your most powerful traits stay invisible to you because they come so naturally. For example, an extrovert works a room well but genuinely cannot explain "how."

This workshop comes from To Thine Own Self Be True, Chapter 11 of Hidden Multipliers. It is the companion to Find Your Carol. In that workshop, you built the customer who is naturally perfect for your product. Here, you build the strategy that is naturally perfect for you. This workshop runs as two skills. The first skill draws an honest map of who you are. It records each trait as a fact, not as a strength or a weakness — the effect of a trait depends on the context ("Competitive" wins a sales call and poisons a team meeting). The second skill distills that map down to the one or two traits. These traits are so extreme, and so uniquely yours, that customers accept every other trade-off. Each skill produces a file. The next step — and your positioning, pricing, and product decisions — uses that file.

How to run it

  1. Map who you actually are. Who, Me? helps you get out of the jar. It uses drive prompts (even as a kid I would ___), anti-questions (when I'm faced with ___, I feel it in the pit of my stomach), and outside-in questions. You give these questions to people who know you. They ask about your perfect scenario, your personal hell, and the strengths you cannot see because they come so naturally. The skill presses every flattering label until it finds the real event behind it. It also welcomes unglamorous motives, such as money, fame, or proving a point. The result is a file named WHO-ME.md. Each finding is a fact about your personality, with the contexts where it helps and where it quietly causes harm.
  2. Distill to your voter(s). Voters takes that self-portrait and tests every candidate trait through a hard set of checks: extremity earned through obsession, rarity among your peers, decisiveness, and reverberation into product, pricing, and market. The skill allows at most two traits to pass. This is the debate tactic that wins a contest you are losing on points: one or two decisive strengths override every weakness, the way Steve Jobs's obsession with industrial design overpowered the weaknesses of iTunes. The output is a file named VOTERS.md. It lists at most two voters, with their evidence and downstream effects, plus the near-miss special strengths you can build on as secondary pillars — or, if nothing is extreme enough yet, an honest statement of that fact.

What you get at the end

VOTERS.md is the seed of a strategy that competitors cannot copy. It grows from an obsession they are not willing to match. It shapes the rest of your decisions: your positioning leads with the voter, your pricing strategy lives up to it, your product reverberates from it, and your market loves you for it — even reading your weaknesses as proof of the strength they came for.

This workshop also closes the loop with Find Your Carol. Suppose you and your product are in harmony, but the customer is not. Then, by definition, that customer was not Carol. Re-run the Carol analysis with what you now know. Together, the two "Who?" workshops define the two people every strategy depends on: your ideal customer, and you.

The steps

This workshop runs several skills in sequence, and some rely on others (like asb-rude-qa) — install the whole set before you begin: run npx skills add asmartbear/asb-skills, or ↓ download all skills as one ZIP. More install options →

  1. Who, Me?

    Uncovers who you actually are.

    Yourself, honestly — plus answers from a few people who know you well (the skill assigns them the outside-in questions). 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.

    asb-who-me

  2. Voters

    Distills you to your decisive advantage.

    Your WHO-ME.md self-portrait, a strengths or keystones chart, or your war stories told live. A VOTERS.md: at most two voters with evidence, the costs they overpower, and what they force downstream — plus the near-miss special strengths to deploy as secondary pillars — or the honest verdict that nothing is extreme yet.

    asb-voters