Everyone talks about using your gifts. Almost nobody talks about using your curse. And as a founder, that’s the most underrated leverage there is.
Most people never actually find where their edge comes from, the personal feature that makes them dangerous. And here’s the part they miss: that edge doesn’t have to be a gift. It can just as easily come from bad luck, or a bad situation you were handed and never chose.
Mine came from being a refugee. In a country that wasn’t mine, I couldn’t get the normal jobs, those went to locals by default. So I had to scrape for whatever work I could find, and even then it was never the good stuff. You search endlessly, you eat rejection after rejection, you fail a lot. As a kid, that wrecks you. But if you grow up inside it long enough, something flips. “No” stops being a wound and becomes the normal answer. You go into crocodile mode, cold, low, and just pushing forward no matter what.
I didn’t understand what that was worth until I got into startups. Once I named it, I realized I could isolate my emotions from rejection completely. That’s an enormous edge. I could push an idea, get told no, and move to the next one in a fraction of the time it took other people, because for them the no hurt, and for me it was just Tuesday. They’d give up right where I’d barely felt it.
That’s mine. Yours will be something totally different. Maybe you were a deeply loved child, so you carry real confidence, and confidence turns into charisma, into the ability to sell and upsell without flinching. If that’s your thing, your job is to find it and sharpen it, not leave it lying around unused.
Because everyone has something. It’s not always a wound or a chip on the shoulder, sometimes it’s a genuine gift, or just some accident of your life that quietly handed you an asymmetric advantage. The point is the same: it’s your job to find it.
Here’s how you spot it. It’s the thing you do so naturally you barely notice you’re doing it. So easy for you, so hard for everyone else, that you don’t even feel like an operator when you do it. That gap, effortless for you, impossible for them, is exactly where your leverage lives.
One honest warning. If your edge comes from a wound, you’ll be tempted to keep the wound open on purpose, because it’s useful. Don’t. And don’t go so numb to rejection that you stop hearing the no’s that actually carry signal. Use the scar. You don’t have to keep cutting it.
Find your thing. Then build the whole company on the one place where you’re unfair.
“PMF with a 1000 iterations.”
“The game never ends. That’s the way I live my life. That’s the way I think about everything I do. I don’t think about winning or losing ever, on anything I do. I just keep playing the game.”Micky Malka
“Don’t fight in the North or the South. Fight every battle, everywhere, always, in your mind. Everyone is your enemy, everyone is your friend. Every possible series of events is happening all at once. Live that way and nothing will surprise you. Everything that happens will be something that you’ve seen before.”Petyr Baelish
“If you don’t know what to do, build capacity.”
“To win at everything, you have to start by winning something.”Hayden Adams
“Action produces information. If you’re unsure of what to do, just do anything, even if it’s the wrong thing. This will give you information about what you should actually be doing.
Sounds simple on the surface, the hard part is making it part of your every day working process.”Brian Armstrong
“Compound interest is the eighth wonder of the world. He who understands it, earns it; he who doesn’t, pays it.”Albert Einstein