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This column will change your life: why do we undervalue what we're good at?

'If a talent comes naturally, you conclude that it's nothing special. And so you gravitate toward whatever it is you can't do'

 Rothbard's Law raises two complicating thoughts. One is that you might not perceive your strengths at all, imagining them instead to be run-of-the-mill capabilities possessed by everyone. The other is that focusing on them might feel boring, even meaningless, compared with the thrill of the unknown.

The trick – easier to talk about than to do, as ever – is to pick challenges adjacent to your existing skills, not diametrically opposed to them. The more profound difficulty is to learn to see your unique skills for what they are – and, when it comes to salary negotiations and suchlike, to resist undervaluing them. All this might sound like the cheesiest sort of self-esteem-boosting advice: "Everyone's good at something!" I'm sure that mushy conclusion would have appalled Rothbard (and it's empirically untrue, anyway, because there's Ashton Kutcher.) The more down-to-earth, more genuinely cheering implication of his law is that you may well be more talented than you think.

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