Having Many Skills

Albert Einstein quotation as shown at Flickr

All my life I have dealt with objective matters; hence I lack both the natural aptitude and the experience to deal properly with people and to carry out official functions. -Albert Einstein

Recently a friend mentioned trying to decide whether to stick with a job in which she is very good, but she feels like something essential for her is missing. I know some highly talented people, so this is not the first time such a quandary has turned up.

The world is designed for people who are good in a specific area. Why? Because for most of us, that’s life. We’ve become good at this thing right here and quickly get out of our depth when we try doing something radically different.

It is mesmerizing to watch someone do what they do best. It is a joy and a wonder. It can also be deliciously satisfying for them to do it, knowing they are great at it.

The world is not designed for people who, in the words of Xena the Warrior Princess, “have many skills.”

What Constitutes “Having Many Skills”

My friend has many skills. If she went through anything like the Johnson O'Connor Research Foundation's test series, she would turn up with a highly unusual combination of knowledge and capabilities. (JOCRF doesn’t test to find out what you like. They test what you know and have particular aptitude to do.)

This friend is good at creative work and at highly technical work. The latter is how she makes a living. She craves doing the former.

Unusual combinations of aptitudes lead to difficulties in the working world. Jobs are generally designed for profiles that are easily found, not rare.

The world tends to structure jobs to fit what is readily available in the workforce. If you have great skills in a well defined range, you know what jobs fit you and bosses know which jobs to hire you into. A boss would be crazy to insist on a rare combination of wildly disparate skills in a job. People with that set of skills would be as almost as rare as hen’s teeth and the boss would have to hire whoever turned up with that set of skills, no matter what else might give them pause.

If you are like my friend with skills far apart on the spectrum, it is nigh unto impossible to find a job where you can use all your strongest skills. Every job is likely to leave you feeling like part of your soul is starving. What can you do to alleviate that?

Satisfying a Strange Combination of Skills at Work

This is less problematic in the USA than it is in the UK. In Britain we’re supposed to fit in a pigeonhole and stay there. This has been troublesome for me ever since I moved to the UK because I don't fit into any pigeonholes. The USA is somewhat more freewheeling, but even there, jobs typically don’t fit people with unusual combinations of capabilities.

My parents put my brother and me through the Johnson O’Connor tests when he was at university and I was at the Johnson Space Center. My sister knew exactly what she wanted and didn’t go through the test series. I thought I knew and turned out to just need a couple of insights.

My peaks don't cross as wide a spectrum as my friend’s, but I have high aptitudes that seldom occur together. My brother has more aptitude peaks across a broader range, another rare situation. He and I dealt with our profiles differently.

Please don’t get me wrong here. I love the space program. I’ve loved it since I watched John Glenn go into orbit when I was a small child. But like my friend, while I was working at JSC, I felt restless and often out of place, a misfit.

When I left JSC, I worked as a contractor for the next five years. Then I took the next step, formed my own business and carried on as a contractor or consultant on my own.

That fit me much better than being an employee. Clients used both sets of my skills, often to the hilt. On average, projects lasted about a year, so I got shaken out of any creeping complacency on a regular basis.

Other things were going on with me too… Health issues, mostly, which made everything hard. Businesswise, I’m not good at sales or marketing. That weakness made being an independent consultant more difficult than it could have been. Even independent consultants still face the British pigeonhole problem, so moving here added more hurdles. However, independents have more wriggle room than employees, more latitude to at least partially and sometimes completely define the shape of their pigeonhole. It has been a roller coaster, but it suits my personality as well as my skillset.

Twice I tried going back to a “regular job.” I simply don’t fit there.

Satisfying a Strange Combination of Skills in Life

Sometimes it isn’t possible to satisfy disparate skills at work. That is my brother’s situation. He could have gone into business, which would have tapped all his wide range of skills. He didn’t want to run a business and there simply wouldn’t be a job capable of covering his range.

He dealt with it by using one set of skills at work and taking up activities outside work to use the other set of skills. Certain charities have benefited from that.

He is far from the only one to handle the dilemma this way.

When I was on contract in Digital Equipment Corporation’s OpenVMS operating systems group, the woman who led an exceedingly ambitious new release of the operating system was stunningly capable at that intensely technical orchestration, and also stunningly creative and artistic. When she dabbled with quilting, one of her patchwork quilts ended up featured in a book about quilting. When she dabbled with pottery, she made her own dishes and goblets. They looked and felt like wares from a high end designer. When she dabbled with keeping tropical fish, she put a couple hundred gallons or so of salt water reef tanks in her house. Of all the people I worked with there, she is the one who became a good friend. I have always been in awe of her.

At the time, that software engineering group was widely regarded as the best in the world. Everyone in the group was like this woman. Their hobbies were over the top. Their skills in their hobbies were over the top, just like their skill in their jobs. They were driven, exacting, perfectionistic, wondrously talented… and I felt surrounded by the most satisfied group of people I’ve ever known.

Which Way to Go?

If your peak aptitudes are not neatly focused in one area and instead are strong skills that don’t usually occur together… you probably don’t need a research foundation’s tests to tell you. Deep inside, you probably know.

If you need to break out of the confines of a typical job to exercise all those skills, should you try my brother’s solution, or mine, or invent your own?

Going independent or setting up a business is a big step to take. Running a business is best with a wide range of skills like my brother’s rather than two disparate peaks like mine. If your profile is more like mine, a business partner who counterbalances your weak spots (e.g. sales and marketing for me) would be ideal. I had another business for many years that performed well, and the key to it was my business partner. Had I ever found the right partner for my consulting business, it would have done much better.

Where possible, the best way to go into business may be to dip a toe in the water on the side while keeping your job (if your employment contract allows—British jobs often claim what seems like ownership of your life). That would give you a chance to figure out how to bundle your disparate skills together in a way that can land you good clients, good projects, maybe a business partner if you need one, and a decent income.

To be honest, my brother's solution is easier and more secure. This requires continuing to be employed in a job for one set of your skills and satisfying your other skills by taking contracts on the side, doing volunteer work or developing hobbies like my colleagues in the operating systems group. The job pays your bills and exercises part of you. The outside interests exercise the rest of you. Put all that together and your soul no longer feels starved.

If you are fortunate enough to have many skills, I hope you find a way to nurture them all.

P.S.—My use of language has been slightly loose in this post. I have often used skills as shorthand for aptitude and knowledge.