Chad Silverstein explains how to find your unique ability by combining what you love with what you're good at. He argues against chasing money alone, suggests collaborating or finding adjacent opportunities if direct paths seem blocked, and recommends using assessments and AI to clarify your purpose.
Chapters
I'm all about building a strong core and working on yourself, doing the inner work necessary to be successful in life and work with your family and every big bucket of your life. But you can't ignore the outer part of your life and the things that you don't have control over, but that you can go do. Choosing your job, the roles that you play at work, the types of activities that you spend your time doing with hobbies and having aim at what you enjoy doing, and not just getting a job and not chasing after money. You know, again, do the inner work. But when you're externally going after things in your life, there is a sense of listening to yourself and learning how to hear your own voice tell you what you like and what you don't like, and to go pursue things that you feel like your inclination is telling you something feels right about that. Follow it, go after it. You know, life's too short to get stuck doing things that you hate. And the whole point of finding your unique ability, the things that we like to say that you love, that you're really good at. What could be more important than spending your time and energy figuring out what that is? The alternative is to be stuck doing things that you hate, spending your entire life wasting your life serving someone else's goals to make them more money while you're being a slave to whatever it is that you're doing. Life is way too short for you to kind of look back and have regrets. So figuring out what you're good at, figuring out what brings you passion, even if you think, which a lot of people will say, I can't make money doing what I love. There are different ways of being creative, to figure out what types of opportunities live in that world. So you may not be able to do what you love to do, but you can find something connected to it. You can collaborate with other people who are doing it. There are just so many things that you're not thinking of. And that's the key. That's the ability to be able to see outside of yourself and to understand that the things you think are not possible, they're totally possible. People do it. And the fact that people do it should be proof enough for you to be able to say, if someone else can do it, then I can do it. It's just. Unfortunately, most people are paralyzed by fear. They're scared because they don't think they can do it. They don't think they could make money doing something they love. And there's nothing more important than pursuing something in your life. That is aligned with your unique ability and figuring out how to get all of your responsibilities and all the things that you do into this quadrant of the things that you love and the things that you're really good at and to start saying no to more things. You know, the ability to say no to something is a huge skill that leaders build in order to be able to stay within their unique ability. And if you don't know what your purpose is, if you don't have a why behind why you do what you do and you don't even know what it is that you love, then you won't say no. You'll just say yes to everything that comes because you have no other purpose. And then you're stuck doing everybody else's yeses and then you don't have time to do what you love if you ever have an opportunity to figure that out. So learn to take stock and not only doing the inner work, but also figuring out where you're being called. Listen to that voice. Move towards playing with different things in your life. If you're coming out of college and you're lost and you're not sure what to do, there are so many free resources to get assessments that today you can have chatgpt who probably knows you better than you know yourself if you feed it enough information to be able to make recommendations and help you understand you, again, better than you know yourself. And that's, that's really important for you to be able to kind of move towards that in your life so that you could spend more time doing your unique ability and love what you do, love what you do and, and be great at what you do and then master that domain. Be really good at one thing, provide value. And when you provide value, you'll be paid generously.
