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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, a career — is the one whose success hinges on things you already do exceptionally well and want to keep doing for years. It's the game you're built to win: your King's Gambit, the opening competitors dismiss as "refuted" because they're evaluating the wrong player. But you can't build a company in the shape of you until you know the shape — and "know thyself" has been the hardest assignment for two and a half millennia. You can't read the label from inside the jar. You're biased, you rehearse who you think you should be, and your most powerful traits are invisible to you precisely because they come so naturally — like the extrovert who works a room and genuinely can't explain "how."

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

How to run it

  1. Map who you actually are. Who, Me? runs the way out of the jar: the drive prompts (even as a kid I would ___), the anti-questions (when I'm faced with ___, I feel it in the pit of my stomach), and the outside-in questions you hand to people who know you — your perfect scenario, your personal hell, and the strengths you can't see because they come so naturally. It presses every flattering label for the concrete episode behind it and welcomes the unglamorous motives — money, fame, proving a point. The result is WHO-ME.md: each finding a fact of your personality, with the contexts where it helps and where it quietly wrecks things.
  2. Distill to your voter(s). Voters takes that self-portrait and runs every candidate through a hard gauntlet — extremity earned through obsession, rarity among peers, decisiveness, and reverberation into product, pricing, and market — then caps the answer at two. It's the debate tactic that wins a contest you're losing on points: one or two decisive strengths override every deficiency, the way Steve Jobs's obsession with industrial design overpowered iTunes. The output is VOTERS.md: at most two voters with their evidence and downstream consequences, plus the near-miss special strengths to build on as secondary pillars — or the honest verdict that nothing is extreme enough yet.

What you get at the end

VOTERS.md is the seed of a strategy competitors can't copy, because it grows from an obsession they aren't willing to match. It flows outward into the rest of your decisions: positioning that leads with the voter, a pricing strategy that lives up to it, a product that reverberates from it, and a market that loves you for it — even reading your weaknesses as proof of the thing they came for.

And it closes the loop with Find Your Carol: when you and your product are in harmony but the customer isn't, then by definition that wasn't Carol — you re-run the Carol analysis with what you now know. Together, the two "Who?" workshops pin down the two people every strategy turns 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