How to say what you're good at

On discord recently, someone was asking for advice on how to write their annual performance review. This is a task I’ve done… never, actually, so obviously I’m extremely well qualified to weigh in and advise on it.¹

The thing about this task that most people I know struggle with is writing positive things about themselves in their review. Sometimes this is because they cringe at the idea of bragging, but often it’s just that they don’t actually know what they’re good at.

This isn’t just a problem for annual performance reviews. It’s also a problem when writing CVs, speaker bios, etc. It’s just genuinely hard to write down a simple and clear account of your strengths.

And, of course, ideally you would know yourself and be able to self assess, because self knowledge is good for you even if you don’t currently have to report on it for any specific reason.

As with many hard things, I think part of this is just that nobody has ever told you how to do it. So, here’s one way to do it.

Probably the best piece of advice I have on this comes from Sasha Chapin:

[…] talent doesn’t feel like you’re amazing. It feels like the difficulties that trouble others are mysteriously absent in your case. Don’t ask yourself where your true gifts lie. Ask what other people seem weirdly bad at.

A related thing it feels like is that people are weirdly lazy - you wish they’d do this particular thing. It’s not like it’s hard, people, just put in some effort.

When writing, particularly when writing a first draft or just generating some ideas, I find that it’s often helpful to think in terms of “mental autocompletion”.² You’re starting from some point, and then just letting the words flow naturally from there.

The problem is, sometimes you don’t have a completion that feels true, and as a result you will struggle with mental autocompletion. That doesn’t mean you can’t write, but it does mean that writing it will not feel natural.

If you’re trying to write a self-assessment and are starting from something like “I am good at…” and struggling, then this is probably because, as Sasha points out, being good at things doesn’t feel like being good at things. As a result, nothing you put there is going to feel like it fits. This is a form of writers block, but as with a lot of writers block, the real problem isn’t that you’ve got a block that stops you continuing from where you are, the problem is that you’re trying to write the wrong thing.

Instead, you should consider starting not from what you’re good at, but from complaining about your coworkers (or other peers who are relevant in context). Some good starting points are:

• Why are they so bad at…?

• Why don’t they just…?

• Why do they need me to… (instead of doing it/figuring it out for themselves)?

It’s worth considering both the general and the specific. If you can complain about all your coworkers, then you’ve probably got a pretty good pattern, but it might be helpful to start with specific ones, especially specific ones who you otherwise respect and consider to be at about your level.

Your mileage may vary on whether this works, but for me personally I find it’s really helpful to just rant out loud about this, in a very over the top chewing the scenery sort of way. Bring some real “Those fools! I’ll show them! I’ll show them all!” energy to it, or whatever allows you to be somewhat comedically over the top. For example, another variation on this is to wail in distress at how oppressed you are by those around you and their terrible ways, wailing with the demeanour of a cat that was meant to have been fed three minutes ago.

This won’t get you material that you can include in your performance review directly of course (especially if you’ve managed to go suitably over the top), but it gives you a good starting point: Once you’ve identified what everyone else is bad at, you can start asking the question: Are they? Or am I just good at it?

From there, you can start to turn this first draft material into a dryer self assessment. Ideally it should be fairly plain and matter of fact - don’t go too corporate bullshit. You’re not here to leverage synergies in order to energise a dynamic commitment to shareholder value. You just want to tell people that you’re good at fixing things, or mentoring, or helping people think clearly, or whatever it is it turns out you’re good at.

For this, let me tell you another form of autocompletion and paying attention to your feelings that is really helpful for overcoming writer’s block once you know the general shape of what you want to write but are struggling to actually write it.

It’s a very simple process:

1. Dump your notes into Claude or ChatGPT and tell it what you want to write.

2. Copy its output to a separate document.

3. Stare at what it wrote for a bit.

4. Let the hate flow through you.

5. Delete whatever drivel it wrote and write something better, because you can definitely improve on that.³

At the end of this process, you should have something you can submit for your annual review, or whatever else you needed to self assess for.

1. Sarcasm aside, apparently I am?

I about equally often get told that I’m arrogant and that I’m too hard on myself when reporting simple factual statements which I have little strong feelings about either way, and I find this somewhat baffling when it happens. Can you people just not self-assess without having strong emotions about it?

I mean I’m not saying I never have strong emotions about being good or bad at things, it’s just not the default.

What I’m saying I guess is that other people are bafflingly bad at self-assessment…

2. I want to emphasise that I have been using this frame since well before LLMs were a thing. GPT2 might have been out when I started using it, but GPT3 certainly wasn’t.

You can think of this as operating in LLM mode and trying to complete a prompt, although I don’t think that’s quite right. The difference between this and behaving like an LLM is that if you’re doing it right you’re not just generating some words that fit, you’re following the sense of what feels actually true. You’re not trying to just say things, you’re trying to speak truths.

3. It’s certainly possible that some of what it wrote will be OK, and you don’t actually have to delete all of it, but I really strongly encourage you not to edit what it wrote into something usable, but instead to write your own thing, borrowing as little or as much from it as you feel you need/want to.