It’s not about finding what you can do better than others, but about finding what you can do exceptionally well relative to other ways you could expend yourself.

After a multi-decade career focused on doing surgery, Albright extended out and chose a big new responsibility. She founded the MIT Collaborative Initiatives, tapping her natural encodings for creative collaboration, reveling in bringing together people across disparate arenas to stimulate breakthroughs in thinking. She’d mix architects with military officers with business CEOs with leaders of national health systems to work together on problems like childhood obesity, stroke, and PTSD. She sparkled with enthusiasm when talking about her efforts.

But as I got deeper into this research, observing the vast differences across the people in this study and how they flourished at their best when life lined up with their encodings and what fed their inner fire, I gradually began to change. Subtly at first, I began to shift away from trying to change people into what I wanted them to be. Simultaneously, I shifted toward finding or creating the best possible match between their encodings and their responsibilities. It didn’t happen overnight, it was more of a managerial form of simplex stepping. I’d sense something about a person’s encodings, and then I’d make a shift in their responsibilities to fir those encodings. Then I might observe something else about their encodings, discovering something wonderful about them when they thrived in a task, and I’d make another shift in responsibilities. Together, we essentially simplex stepped toward them coming into frame in a seat on the bus.

My attempts to mold him failed, and I felt increasingly frustrated. He thought I’d fire him. Fortunately, for him and me, I began to grasp that he had not failed me; rather, I had failed him by putting him in a role out of frame with his encodings. Furthermore, I felt somewhat responsible for his future; I did not want to see this wonderful young man start his professional life getting fired. So, I began making a series of iterative steps, testing him with different tasks that drew upon what I sensed to be his intellectual gifts, and he showed signs of flourishing.

It began with wiseness. She engaged you with challenge. She picked problems captured by that phrase, “at the frontier of your skills.” “Now this is level three . . . It’s going to get more difficult.” Her instruction was Socratic. She wanted you to see that your own thinking could solve problems. She corrected you by asking questions about your reasoning. She inoculated you against frustration. She made it seem normal: “Now, this may be a little harder since it has been a minute since we have done that type of problem.” Her praise was largely indirect— “we’re ready for the next level of work”— or she reminded you of how hard the problem you solved was— with just a note of being impressed. She diminished your failures; “I think I didn’t tell you what I wanted.” She used questions to stimulate your curiosity; “OK, can you think of yet another way to solve the problem?” Her questions focused on you solving the small parts of math problems that enabled you to solve whole problems. She avoided any focus on the question of your math ability. She gave no direct praise or criticism of your performance or ability. She used no incentives. She simply led you, in tiny increments, to see your math potential for yourself. You accumulated successes. You became more engaged, more curious, more confident. You began to feel like you could do these problems— your math identity notwithstanding.