Second Nature Skills

What can you do without trying that hard?

Ever noticed how some things just come naturally to you, while other people have to try really hard at the same things? I call these “second nature skills.” You probably have more than one.

These aren’t necessarily the innate talents your parents could rattle off about you (though you can have a natural penchant for them). They aren’t always your most standout qualities or the ones you care the most about either (though they could be). Rather, they tend to be specific, often niche abilities you’ve uncovered over time, in practice, usually without realizing it.

The MacGyver of the Household

Over time I’ve stumbled across a bunch of these for myself.

Growing up, I was the MacGyver of the household (my parents would later say). I could make just about anything with tape and random junk from the junk drawer. I was also the go-to person for finding anything that went missing around the house. I had this uncanny ability to remember seeing the missing item in passing or making strategic guesses. “If I were X thing, where would I be?” — I’d say it aloud as I was on the hunt.

I had a good sense of depth, direction, spatial orientation. Driving came naturally to me. So did a lot of games that didn’t require any prior knowledge. And I was always good in a crisis (a trait that has served me well in almost every job I’ve had).

In the realm of building products, one of my second nature skills is how quickly I can grasp what makes a consumer product good or not. I can figure out the core value prop fast and spot what’s just fluff. Even if I’m not the target audience, I can see why something would or wouldn’t captivate others. I’m pretty good at crafting analogies, metaphors, and frameworks to explain art, products, and people. I could keep the list going in other arenas.

Logic x Creativity x Humanity

After brain-dumping all of these second nature skills, it feels like a lot. How could I have so many random things that come easy to me? Are any of them even useful? Consequential? For a long time these questions made it hard for me to figure out which skills I should really lean into and pursue more seriously.

Eventually I realized that there are themes among them, and that really helped.

My natural abilities tend to be where logic, creativity, and humanity intersect. That still sounds vague. If I had to boil it down even further, I’d say I’m resourceful and I can read a room (or a group of people, myself included). I’m good at figuring stuff out in a new way, which is both a blessing and a curse of the ‘generalist.’ The real challenge is deciding which things you want to figure out over the long haul, over and over again, and ideally in a way that’ll add something valuable to the world.

All that said, it’s tough to sell “understanding a consumer product” or “having an eye for color and patterns” or “being resourceful” on their own. We tend to talk about skills as big things, but in reality, most skills are just small parts of some larger whole that’s yet be realized.

It Takes a Bunch of Micro Skills

Second nature skills rarely stand alone. It takes a bunch of micro skills and actions combined to create anything meaningful.

Someone who’s great at “building products” isn’t just good at the big picture—they excel at a ton of smaller tasks that come together to make a product. Same with making movies or writing. And someone who is great at “writing” is still only great at some parts of the process, average at some parts, and probably even bad at some parts.

Their second nature skills are where they effortlessly shine though. They tend to be highly specific and found through experience. Having a second nature skill doesn’t mean you don’t have to try. It just means you can rely on it to give you a good start without a massive struggle.

It’s easy to overlook these skills because we tend to take what comes easy for granted. Sometimes, what you’re naturally good at slaps an identity on you before you’ve even had a chance to decide if you want it. Other times, the thing you’re good at doesn’t have an obvious application yet, so it sits on the shelf unused.

We tend to think that the most storied people were either overnight successes, else they had to grind for every ounce of their success over a lifetime. The truth is probably somewhere in between. My belief: most successful people have a “second nature skill” that gives them a jump start. If they have to do three things well to succeed in their quest, maybe one of those three things comes naturally to them. And this second nature skill frees them up to focus on mastering the other two. Second nature skills are your cheat codes.

Note: Of course the effort and resilience required to master those other two things (and the innumerable unpleasant tasks that pop up along the way of any quest) is massive. And the people who come out on top, ahead, successful, etc. are those who are willing to grind it out on the things that don’t come as easy to them either, even if they did have some kind of cheat code.

Finding Your Piano

I see examples of this everywhere — in real life and in stories that echo real life.

Take the TV show Dave, based on the life of Dave Burd, aka Lil Dicky. Besides playing the main character, Dave is deeply involved in writing, producing, and just about every aspect of the show. While all those other things require herculean effort and attention, acting as himself is his second nature skill:

“That's the one thing that I'm lucky. The thing I think about the least is the acting. I put so much time and energy into the writing, the set, the tone, how we want it to be shot, look, and feel. That takes up every ounce of my energy. And then I'll enter a scene being like, huh, I actually haven't even given this any thought as an actor. But fortunately, I'm being myself and it's written for [me], I know how I would react in a situation. So I can just live off my instincts.”

Or take the classic film Good Will Hunting. In the off chance that you haven’t seen it, Matt Damon plays Will Hunting, a 20-year old self-taught math genius working as a janitor when he’s discovered by a professor at MIT. When his girlfriend, frustrated, asks how he can learn things so quickly while others at Harvard struggle, he explains it like this:

Will: “Beethoven, okay. He looked at a piano, and it just made sense to him. He could just play.

Skylar : So what are you saying? You play the piano?

Will : No, not a lick. I mean, I look at a piano, I see a bunch of keys, three pedals, and a box of wood. But Beethoven, Mozart, they saw it, they could just play. I couldn't paint you a picture, I probably can't hit the ball out of Fenway, and I can't play the piano.

Skylar : But you can do my o-chem paper in under an hour.

Will: Right. Well, I mean when it came to stuff like that... I could always just play. That’s the best I can explain.”

What’s your piano? The thing that you could always just play?

I like to say figure out what comes easy to you, then go hard at it.

Nothing big ever comes easy, but parts of things do.

Once you identify those parts — those effortless strengths that you can’t shake no matter how much you ignore them — embrace them, make the best use of them.

Whether they help you find your flow state, make a living, or become part of your life’s work, your second nature skills are yours to use as you see fit (not to be beholden to without any say). But whatever you do, be thankful for them — because someone else would die for them.

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