Every career coach says the same thing: “name your strengths.” For a lot of neurodivergent people, that instruction quietly fails — and it fails for a specific reason. Masking doesn’t just hide your strengths from other people. It hides them from you.
When something is genuinely easy for you, it doesn’t register as a skill. It feels like the baseline — the thing everyone can obviously do — so you discount it, look past it, and end up on your CV selling the things you’re actually worst at. Page 4 of the manual is about fixing that, and the fix is counterintuitive: stop assessing yourself. You’re an unreliable witness to your own strengths. Go looking for evidence instead.
Three places the evidence lives
- Compliments you brushed off. The praise you waved away with “nah, I have that all the time.” That reflex — doesn’t everyone? — is the exact tell. If you instinctively discount it, it’s probably a real strength you can’t see.
- Hours that vanished. The times you started something and looked up to find it was suddenly 4pm, or 4am. Where your hours disappear is where your natural pull is — and it doesn’t have to be your official job.
- Problems people bring you unasked. The things people just show up and ask you for help with, technical or not. They’ve spotted a pattern in you, reliably, over years. That’s not flattery; it’s data.
All three point the same way: they aren’t your dreams about who you’d like to be. They’re evidence of what’s already there, seen from the outside — where masking can’t erase it.
None of it has to come from a job
This matters most if you’re early on, pivoting, or don’t have much paid history to point at. Evidence doesn’t care where it comes from. A side project, a society you ran, a game you got obsessive about, the thing you quietly organised for free — all of it counts as proof. You’re not assembling a list of job titles; you’re building a case for a capability.
What it looks like when it’s you
I’ll be honest about where I still can’t see my own. On compliments: every few years someone tells me I changed their career — opened their eyes, gave them a chance — and my whole body cringes, come on, shut up. But that reaction is the evidence. What I couldn’t see is that I’m good at spotting the strength in other people and helping them name it. Pattern recognition, aimed at a person. (It’s also, not coincidentally, exactly what I’m doing here with you.)
On hours: give me a problem I can name — something that doesn’t work and I don’t yet understand — and I’ll vanish for hours, happily. That’s what made engineering feel easy, because engineering isn’t really about code; it’s about solving problems. And wanting to solve problems that actually have value — not politics dressed up as problems — is a lot of what pushed me out of the 9-to-5.
On what people bring me: for years, at every company, people have come to me to ask who knows what — who’s working on which thing, who to introduce to whom. Not the org chart, not Slack — me. Seeing the connections in a system, and remembering who’s who, turned out to be a strength I never once wrote down.
Today’s task
Answer three questions honestly, and write the answers down:
- What do people compliment you on that you brush off (bonus points if it makes you cringe)?
- Where do your hours disappear?
- What do people keep coming to you for, unasked?
That’s your evidence. Start the strengths section of your CV from that — not from a blank page and a coach telling you to “just be confident.”
Show transcript
This one will help anyone — neurodivergent or not — because let's be honest, everyone struggles with work and career now. It doesn't matter if you're looking for your first job, trying to pivot, or trying to leave your 9-to-5 and start on your own. Neurodivergent people have it harder, and that's where most of my advice goes, but this one is universal. This is day 4 of the 31 — and don't panic, you don't have to watch all 31. It's a career operating manual for neurodivergent people. Today's the part that's useful for building your CV or a description of yourself to move on with, and I'm giving you tools to do it. (I'll put resources on my website, linked in my bio — ignore anything paid for now, I'll tidy it up later. You can sign up to the newsletter for updates.) I'm Łukasz, dually diagnosed with autism and ADHD, and I love helping people like myself with business and career, because I've been through it — 20-odd years of startups, enterprise, building my own companies and offshore dev houses. I've hired, fired, and been hired. After diagnosis I understood what would have helped me. Over these four days I've been giving you tools. First, naming what drains your energy and what gives it. Then focus — staying in one lane, because otherwise everything takes longer. Now: strengths — but not the way every career coach tells you. They say "name your strengths." That doesn't work for us, because masking blocks our ability to see our own strong sides. You have to read between the lines. (Hello — yes, I have a very demanding audience today; I won't cut her out, she was too sweet, almost like my own daughter. Stay with me.) So, three places to find the evidence. One: any compliment you discarded — the ones where you said "nah, I have that all the time." Two: hours that vanished — you started something and lost all track of time, and suddenly it's 4pm, or 4am. Three: the things people keep coming to you for, unasked. These are the best guides to your strengths. They're not your dreams of becoming someone you're not — they're what people actually see in you. Where I still struggle to see my own: with compliments, every few years I bump into someone who says "that guy changed my career, gave me a chance, opened my eyes," and I cringe — come on, shut up. But that tells me there's something in how I work with people: I can see the strength in others even when I can't see it in myself. Pattern recognition, pointed at a person. With hours: give me a problem I can name — something that doesn't work and I don't understand — and I'll disappear for hours. That made engineering easy, because engineering isn't about coding, it's about solving problems. Wanting to solve problems that actually have value — not company politics — is a lot of what pushed me out of the 9-to-5. And what people bring me: at every company, people come to me to ask who knows what — who's doing which thing, who to connect with. Not LinkedIn, not Slack, not the org chart — me. Seeing the connections in a system, remembering who's who: a strength I never wrote down. So today's task: answer three questions. What do people compliment you on that you feel cringey about? Where do your hours disappear? And what kind of problems do people keep coming to you with? It was a long one, but I enjoyed it. Am I getting better? Let me know in the comments.