Superpowers that we can all develop

We are all born with certain skills that give us a natural advantage in different facets of life. There maybe some among us who can speak very confidently and others who can put their thoughts to paper with very little effort. In other words, you have above average ability in some area without putting in a lot of deliberate practice. Some of these skills may go on to define our career and life choices in ways that aren’t always obvious to us. But there are a lot of other skills that can be developed by everyone irrespective of their innate abilities. I want to share some of the common ones I have observed in the people around me and which have influenced me on a personal level. These are classified as ‘superpowers’ since they allow us to do things that we didn’t think we are capable of!

1. Speed

Speed as a superpower can be defined as the mindset to do things as fast as you possibly can.

Why is speed one of the important superpowers?

I’ll start with the obvious reason – if you can do things faster, you’ll have more time to do things! But there are some non-obvious reasons too. Imagine you have a colleague who responds really quickly to your emails/messages/code review requests and a colleague who is incredibly slow in all of those things. All else being equal — who do you like and trust more? I am guessing it’s the colleague who is faster. Why is that? I suspect it’s because humans tend to equate responsiveness with feeling valued and respected.

Another reason why speed is important is that it benefits those around us by providing faster feedback for actions which accelerates learning and improvement. (For those who appreciate the value of continuous integration/deployment for code, this idea should not come as a surprise.) This is also the reason why startups move faster than bigger companies because they are incentivized to make decisions and move quickly for their own survival.

(If you need more convincing, check out Ben Kuhn’s “Be Impatient” blog post. This is the most compelling and comprehensive write-up on this topic!)

How can I improve my speed?

To develop this superpower, start by asking yourself the question – “How can I do this faster?”, identifying the bottlenecks, figuring out ways to remove/mitigate them and repeating this process over and over again. More often than not, by stepping back and asking yourself this question, you will be able to identify faster, more efficient ways to do what you need to do and sometimes the bottlenecks may just be in your mind. Like with most things, this is a muscle that gets better with practice and at some point you would be doing things so much faster than you ever thought was possible. At some level, all the productivity hacks we read about online are just a manifestation of this mindset.

2. Reliability

What does it mean for a person to be reliable? Put simply, you trust that this person will do what they say majority of the time. No one can be completely reliable 100% of the time since misses are inevitable. Even machines designed to do one thing run into issues and we are much more complicated than that!

Why is reliability one of the important superpowers?

To understand why reliability is important, it is helpful to think about this from an engineering perspective. The reliability of any system we build (or how often it correctly does what it’s supposed to do) depends a lot on external dependencies. If one of those dependencies is flaky, then that can make your entire system unpredictable in its operation. Depending on the severity of the issue cause by the failure of the dependency, you may have to invest a lot of time in finding ways to mitigate it (sometimes building alternatives and fail-safe paths). Imagine how much easier life would be if we never had to worry about that dependency and we could just treat it as a reliable blackbox. That would allow us to focus on things that we really need to worry about. This is precisely the value that reliable people bring to those around them.

How can I become a more reliable person?

Becoming a reliable person can be broken down into the following:

• Only commit to things you can do
• Keep track of your commitments (including what needs to be done and by when)
• Follow-through on commitments

From among the three points listed above, we may each have different areas that we need to get better at. Once we identify those areas, making improvements shouldn’t be that hard. Here are some possible suggestions to tackle each of those:

• “Only commit to things you can do” – Take your time to understand what you are committing to, how much time it will take conservatively and what other competing commitments you have.
• “Keep track of your commitments” – I find it helpful to either write them down in a doc or add it to a tracking tool which has a “due date” feature. (Even better if you can just complete the smaller commitments as and when they come up saving you the overhead of tracking. Also see “Speed” above!)
• “Follow-through on commitments” – I like to have a daily ritual of going through my commitments when planning my day to see which ones need to be prioritized.

3. Self-awareness

A quick dictionary search for self-awareness throws up this definition: conscious knowledge of one’s own character, feelings, motives, and desires. I find this definition to be a bit abstract. So let me share my own definition of self-awareness: it is the ability to understand your own thoughts and actions in order to help you make better choices in life. Here’s another way to put it: if you could give yourself feedback, what would it be? And how would it affect how you do things?

Why is self-awareness one of the important superpowers?

Self-awareness allows you to recognize things about yourself before it is obvious to those around us. Why is that? We spend the most amount of time with ourselves and we are fully aware of our thoughts and actions in different situations. So we are each in a very unique position to see patterns in our own behavior before anyone else does. (Of course, we all have blindspots and that’s ok) This can help us understand what we are good at, what we are not good at and how to use this information to inform our future choices. For example, learning a new programming language can be approached in the following ways (not exhaustive):

• Reading through the concepts one-by-one in a book and building a good foundation
• Running through some code examples to build a mental model of how things work
• Writing some code, making mistakes and learning from them
• Getting a tutor and using them to help you understand the concepts
• Some combination of the above

All of the above approaches are totally valid and we each prefer one over the others. But how did we make that decision? The first time you started learned a language, you probably started with one of the approaches. You probably didn’t know that there were all these other choices. Over time, you learned of these other approaches and maybe had a chance to try them out. Now based on the results i.e. how effectively you learned the language, you may have a developed a strong preference for one approach which will influence your future choices. This is the essence of self-awareness.

How can I become more self-aware?

In my view, reflection is the single most important tool for building self-awareness. Reflection is the act of taking time to do some introspection. This can be done either periodically or after some important event/milestone or ideally both. As part of the reflection, I personally like to identify what I am doing well, what I could be doing better and any learnings I have about myself from recent experiences. I also like to maintain a written record of these things and see the patterns over time. If I notice that there are some negative themes which are consistent over a period of time, then it gets me thinking about what I need to change to course-correct. I have realized that it is a lot harder to lie to yourself when the evidence is presented in front of you by someone you trust (you!).

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The above superpowers serve two purposes – amplifying your natural abilities and filling some gaps in other areas. So we should think of these as being complementary to other skills we build. The key to developing these skills is the oldest trick in the book – more practice! It is worth mentioning that even though some of the examples above are in a work context, these superpowers are very much relevant for life in general. Good luck 🙂