Chapter 10: What’s Your Superpower?
Finding the Edge Only You Have
superpower, unique advantage, strengths, differentiation, personal edge, founder identity
Here’s something I want to leave you with before we’re done: you don’t have to be good at everything. You’re not supposed to be. The whole premise that a successful entrepreneur is someone who can do it all — the finance, the legal, the product, the sales, the HR, the strategy — that’s a myth, and it’s a damaging one. You’re going to have a superpower. Maybe one, maybe two things you do exceptionally well. That’s it. That’s all you need to figure out.
Everything else is hiring.
Know What You Are (And What You’re Not)
I’ll tell you what I was good at. Business development. Marketing. Getting in front of people and communicating the message clearly. The business-planning side of things — I was solid there. I could write a plan, I could tell the story, I could go find the money.
I am a terrible lawyer. If you ever need legal advice, do not call me. I am awful at it, and I know it. I’m also terrible at HR. At one point someone put me in charge of HR for a while — I think because everyone had to take a turn — and I remember thinking, really? Do I have to? I did it. It was really hard. I did not like it and I was not good at it and I was relieved when it was over.
That’s not a confession. That’s clarity.
When you know what you’re not good at, you stop wasting energy pretending otherwise. You stop trying to out-lawyer the lawyers or out-finance the CFOs. You know your lane, and you stay in it — which frees you to be genuinely excellent at the thing you actually do well.
There’s a version of self-awareness that looks like weakness. What I’m describing is the opposite. Knowing your superpower — and naming it honestly — is one of the most useful things you can do for yourself as an entrepreneur. It’s the foundation everything else gets built on.
The Smartest Thing I Ever Did
I want to tell you about a hire I made early on — that first check-processing business I mentioned in Chapter 1, the one where we built a system that accelerated cash flow for a network of credit unions. I was maybe thirty at the time. And I hired a guy who was fifty.
In my mind, at thirty, fifty was really old. Not from where I’m standing now — but back then, this guy might as well have been ancient. I hired him anyway, because he knew the business backwards and forwards. He understood operations in a way I didn’t, in a way I hadn’t had time to learn yet. He could make the thing actually work.
It turned out to be the smartest decision I made in that business.
We had a great partnership. He stayed back and ran the operation — made it hum, kept it from falling apart, handled all the things that would have eaten me alive. And that freed me up to go do what I was actually good at: the front-facing work, the business development, the planning. I could be out selling while he was back running the machine.
There’s a lesson in that beyond just “hire experienced people.” The lesson is that I had to be willing to bring in someone older, more seasoned, with a specific expertise I didn’t have — and not feel like I was giving something up by doing it. A lot of young founders resist that. They feel like they need to be the most competent person in the room at all times. That impulse will cost you.
You’re not admitting defeat when you hire someone who’s better than you at something. You’re not admitting weakness. You’re doing the opposite — you’re saying: I know what I bring, and I know what this company needs, and I’m going to get both of those things handled. That’s a strength. Surround yourself with people who have the superpowers you don’t. They exist. Go find them.
The Coffee Test
There’s a practical piece of this that I got from one of my favorite bosses, and I’ve thought about it ever since. He said: I hire people I’ll go out and have coffee with in the morning.
Simple. But think about what it actually means.
You’re going to spend a lot of time with the people you build a company with. A lot of time. Late nights, hard calls, bad quarters, disagreements about strategy, decisions that don’t have good answers. The relationship has to be real, or all of that becomes miserable. I had great relationships with my CEO, my CFO, my product guy — we’d have coffee in the morning, we’d have dinner at night. We genuinely liked each other. And when things got hard — and they always do — that foundation mattered.
Here’s the corollary: you will have difficult conversations with these people. That’s guaranteed. At some point you may have to let someone go. I hope that doesn’t happen to you often, but it will happen. I never got used to it. I never liked it. But I learned something important about how to do it right: it should never be a surprise.
You don’t walk in one day and fire somebody out of nowhere. That’s a failure of leadership, not a hard decision made well. It’s a process — coaching, honest feedback, clear expectations, chances to improve — all the way through. If someone is eventually let go, they should have seen it coming, because you’ve been doing your job as a manager the whole time. The firing is the last step, not the first conversation.
That’s the work. It’s not the dramatic moment. It’s everything that leads up to it.
What You Do vs. Who You Are
This one matters more than it might seem at first.
I’ve met entrepreneurs who have fused their identity with their company. The business becomes who they are — not just what they do. And I understand the appeal. When you build something, when you sacrifice for it, when you pour yourself into it for years, it becomes deeply personal. That passion is part of what makes you good at it.
But there’s a line worth protecting.
When the company becomes who you are, you lose the ability to see it clearly. You lose flexibility. You lose the capacity to make the hard call — to pivot, to bring in new leadership, to sell, to shut it down if you have to. You start defending it the way you’d defend yourself. And that makes everything harder.
I draw this distinction consciously: it’s what I do. It’s not who I am.
When it was time for me to move on from the big operation, I didn’t agonize. I could see that I’d added what I could add, and the company needed something I wasn’t the right person to provide anymore. So I went. No drama. If you keep that line clear — this is what I do, not who I am — it makes the whole thing simpler. Cleaner. More honest.
It also makes it possible to let go with grace, and to move on to the next thing fully present, instead of still emotionally tethered to the last one.
Two Things I’d Tell My Younger Self
I’m going to close with some practical advice, and I’ll be direct about it.
If I were starting over, I would have joined a big company first — for three or four years, maybe five — specifically to learn how to run a business. Not to climb a ladder or collect a title. Just to learn operations. Big companies, whatever else you say about them, are genuinely good at running businesses. They have processes, they have systems, they have people who’ve been doing this for decades. That’s an education you can’t get anywhere else, and it’s one I came to late. I did my big-company experience at the end, and it was valuable — but it would have been more valuable at the beginning.
Then I’d go build my own thing. Start a company, or go independent as a consultant. Because here’s what I’ve discovered, and I mean this: being in control of your own time is profoundly freeing. When you work for someone else, they write the check and they own your calendar. When you work for yourself, you have to fund it — you’re always selling, there’s no coasting — but the schedule is yours.
I retired from my own consulting practice. I worked when I wanted to work. I took time off when I wanted to. That kind of autonomy is something I wouldn’t trade for anything. I wish I’d gotten there earlier.
And one more thing — maybe the most important thing I’ll say today:
Be curious. Not just about business, not just about your industry or your sector or your superpower. Be curious about everything. I’ve got two lifetimes’ worth of things I want to do and learn and see before I run out of time. That’s the right problem to have. There are people my age who can’t retire because they don’t know what else to do — their whole identity was the job, and when the job ended, so did they.
Don’t be that person. Make sure you’re interested in the whole life, not just the work part of it. The work is important. The work is how you build things and test yourself and contribute something. But it’s a part of the picture, not the whole thing.
You’ve spent this book thinking about whether you’re a builder or an operator, what you believe in enough to bet on, how to size a market honestly, how to tell the story of what you’re building, how to navigate the long middle of building something. Now you’ve got one more question to sit with.
What’s your superpower?
Not what you wish it were. Not what looks impressive. What you actually do exceptionally well — the thing that, when you’re in the middle of it, feels less like work and more like moving at full speed.
Figure that out. Build around it. Find the people who have the things you don’t. And go make something worth making.
That’s the whole game. Everything else is just details.