I met Gary Whitfield at a conference in Portland, the kind where everyone wears lanyards and pretends the networking doesn’t exhaust them. He was the only person in the room who wasn’t performing. Or so I thought. Later, I would understand that he was simply performing better than everyone else.
He asked me what I actually did, not what my job title was. Nobody asks that. I told him I untangled things—financial audits, compliance reviews, the kind of work that required you to find what people tried to hide. He smiled and said that sounded like a superpower. I believed him.