You can spend your life working hard, even succeeding, at things someone else could have done.
I did.
As a kid, after watching X-Men every Saturday morning, I’d squeeze my eyes shut and strain, hoping a superpower would explode out of me. I wanted to be extraordinary.
Wolverine. Olympic swimmer. NBA star. World-denting CEO. Reality dismantled each dream, one by one.
I turned down a job in investing because making rich people richer felt hollow. At Procter & Gamble, I loved restructuring the finance reports, but I was a cog in a diaper and tampon-selling machine. At 27 I quit with no plan and two goals: a TED Talk and a Wikipedia page.
A decade later, I was no closer than the day I quit.
Shipping 40 tons of blueberries to Mexico worked. So did the hostel in Squamish. But someone else could have done either.
I tried a few ideas of my own.
- Online résumés for landlords and tenants.
- Butter made from bug fat.
- A movie recommender that gave more weight to critics who shared your taste.
They all flopped.
The Unconventional Route, the travel blog Kim and I started, found an audience. But we couldn’t live off its ad revenue.
Then, in 2021, my son was born.
“My greatest motivation is for him to see me as his hero and use that to motivate himself.”
But so far, I was making a pretty good case for playing it safe.
So I doubled down on my own ideas. I was pumped to launch my first step toward a “comfort zone gym” to my 4,604 newsletter subscribers.
I made it $20 and capped it at 20 people.
Only seven signed up.
“Ugh. Nothing ever works.”
My second son arrived in August 2023. We were living off savings. By January 2024, I wrote that it had finally broken me. I applied for a job.
The obvious path was the one I’d turned down. While I flailed away at one idea after another, my investments kept growing. Investing suited me. I could think for myself, ignore the hype, and wait. It could support my family.
But I’d be riding on other people’s contributions. And I’d be giving up on showing my boys how they could make their own.
Maybe I didn’t have anything special to offer. I tried one more thing anyway.
I gave an AI my whole life, X-Men included, and asked what it thought my superpower was.
My hands came off the keyboard as I read its reply.
“Whoa.”
Suddenly my meandering started to make sense. The finance reports. The movie recommender. The bug butter. The Unconventional Route.
Every time, I’d been digging beneath the accepted answer, finding the differences that mattered, and building a better way to use them.
This was a pattern I could get better at and build around.
I thought of the X-Men again. I didn’t have adamantium claws or eyes that shot lasers. But maybe I was more like a hero I’d never considered: Professor X. His contribution is helping other people put their powers to good use.
“Or maybe Delusion has me in its grips again?” I wrote in my journal.
I offered to find people’s superpowers for $50 anyway. Days later, an entrepreneur deciding whether to buy a business or start a new one said yes.
For the two years since, I’ve been developing a method for doing this with other people. I look across a person’s life and work for a pattern that keeps showing up. Together we check it against the moments that seem to contradict it, then use what holds up to work through a decision they’re facing.
I’m trying to be a real-life Professor X, minus the telepathy.
Some days I still wonder if I can actually make a difference with what makes me different. Four months after that “Whoa,” I wrote that I was closer than ever to quitting. And last quarter my work earned a whopping $0. So who knows? But I know where to start, and I know why I have to try.
As a kid, every Saturday, I watched the X-Men and wished I had a superpower.
Now my boys are watching me find out what I can do with mine.