Yes, You Have a Professional Superpower
I used to work with someone who remembered absolutely everything. She never failed to follow up on each wisp of an idea mentioned in a meeting; she could recall work-related issues that had come up years earlier and how they had been resolved; she remembered every colleague’s name and birthday and partners’ names and partners’ birthdays. Not only did her industrial-strength memory make her a wonderful and reliable employee, but it had a way of making everyone she encountered feel special and valued.
Everyone has some sort of professional superpower. My co-worker, while looking over this draft, informed me that mine is having excellent jokes. (I feel bad not putting a joke here? It’s a lot of pressure! Sorry.) Manoush Zomorodi, host of NPR’s TED Radio Hour, writes on Medium about hers:
I know how to READ a script aloud. No matter how basic or run-on the sentence, I can usually salvage it with the right delivery. In other words, a multitude of crappy writing skills can be covered up with tone and voice, making a dumb-nothing phrase like “you know what I mean?” sound saucy, conspiratorial, plaintive, or instructional. It’s my superpower.
