Lately, I’m seeing a lot of cultural commentary about how things like "taste" and "discernment" have become the new *it* factor.
And, let me tell ya— I'm here for it.
I'm sitting in my office and I'm staring out the windows deep in thought. I love this office and its second-story windows. It makes me feel like I'm in a tree house or something. Anyway, I'm thinking about resumes, and hiring for *it* factors, and whether resumes even showcase the right stuff to hire for those kinds of things, anyway...
So I start reflecting on how I'd even go about finding my own *it* factor—let alone present it—and I'm mulling that over without getting as tripped up as I expected to. Because it did force me to stop and think about myself in an objectively good light for a bit, which I'm still not great at. But I'm sitting in my reading chair, instead of at my desk, and I'm channeling any world-building, creative-fiction type of powers I can find into looking at how I think, communicate, and make decisions through an honest lens.
And you know what?
After just a bit of brainstorming, I found my scaffolding.
I'm sitting there visualizing the core parts of how I operate, and I'm mentally combing through the major learning moments I've had in my career (and in my life) to find the important or defining lessons learned. Things like how clarity compounds and how systems shape behavior... so I'm just writing a list of these things and I'm adding to it as the memories woosh past.
Prioritization is about values.
Satisfied that there's enough to work with, I try to compress and chisel everything down into a few finalists. The core four. Now I move to my desk, because it's time for filing and sorting and organizing, and I'm trying to go a layer deeper. My sparkle and spice, I reason, can probably be found within the actions and circumstances that taught me those core things.
For some reason that's the hardest part. So I'm reminding myself to be nice to... myself—that this is just an exercise, and it's only for funsies.
After that, things actually start falling into place pretty seamlessly.
How would you go about finding your *it* factor? Your sparkle and spice?
onward.
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