Why do I overlook some of my strongest work?
Someone watches you work through a problem and says, “Wow, you are really good at what you do!”
Meanwhile, you are thinking, “Really? That was pretty simple.”
That mismatch might be a sign of where your craft sits.
When we have a high level of knowledge and skill in part of our work, it can feel very straightforward. We know where to start. We notice what matters. We move through the work efficiently, and the result does not feel particularly remarkable to us.
So when we think about our career stories, prepare for an interview, or try to understand our craft, we skip right over it.
Instead, we search for a harder problem. Something that felt like a bigger challenge and therefore seems more worthy of talking about.
The irony is that we can end up choosing work we have less experience in and understand less deeply. Then we struggle to explain it, while overlooking the work we know incredibly well.
Something being easy for you does not make it an unimportant part of your career.
It may be one of the clearest places to start understanding what you bring to your work.
What can easy work tell me about my craft?
When I am helping someone understand their craft, I pay attention to the areas where knowledge, skill, and enjoyment come together.
By craft, I mean the way you bring who you are into your profession: the perspective, reasoning, and approach that shape how you do the work.
Some work feels easy because you have done it many times. You have learned what to look for and how to approach it. And when you also enjoy it, there may be something about that work that aligns closely with who you are.
You might be drawing on your curiosity, your interest in making sense of complicated information, or the satisfaction you get from helping people understand one another.
To you, that may simply feel like doing the job.
To somebody else, it can look like a capability they would struggle to reproduce (or have struggled to).
Ease alone does not tell us that something belongs at the center of your craft. You can become very good at work you do not enjoy. But when work feels easy, you enjoy doing it, and other people consistently value it, that combination is something I’m pretty keen to take another look at.
The first step is to recognize it. The second is to stop dismissing it. Then you can make it an intentional part of how you understand your craft and talk about your career.
How do I uncover the thinking behind something that feels obvious?
One exercise I use is what I call the what–why exercise.
Choose a recent project or task that received praise but felt relatively easy for you to complete. The larger the mismatch between the praise and how straightforward it felt, the more interesting an example it can be.
Then get it out of your head and onto paper (or a notes app, whatever).
Start by listing roughly seven to ten major steps you took, from the moment you first heard about the work to the point when you delivered the result.
You do not need every email, meeting, or small adjustment. You want the main steps that explain how you moved through the project.
That is the “what” part.
Under each step, explore the “why”:
- Why did I take this step?
- Why was it important at that point?
- What did I notice?
- What was I trying to prevent?
- What was I trying to make possible next?
- Where did I learn to approach the work this way?
Spend some time with each answer. “Because that is how I always do it” may be your first response, but there is often more underneath it.
Why is that how you do it? What experience taught you that it helps? What do you recognize in the situation that tells you to take that step?
This is why I suggest keeping the list to seven to ten major steps. You want enough room to explore the thinking behind each one.
What might a deeper explanation look like?
For a hypothetical example, imagine one of your steps was: “I grouped the feedback before making changes.”
That describes an action, but it leaves out your judgment.
When you ask why, you might realize that several people were describing the same underlying concern in different ways. Treating every comment as a separate request would have sent the work in conflicting directions. Grouping the feedback helped you understand which problem needed attention first.
Now you have something more specific to explain.
You noticed a pattern. You understood the risk of responding to each comment independently. You chose an approach that helped you work through the problem.
None of that may have felt difficult to you. You may not even have paused to name it while doing the work.
But there was a thought process behind it, and that thought process is really important!
Even reading through that example, I’m much more interested in hearing more about the second part than the first.
What do I do with the patterns I find?
The “why” behind your steps can reveal your framework, your mental model, or your way of working. Those are the things I want people to understand more deeply when developing their craft.
Once you recognize an approach, you can refine it. You can explain it to someone else. You can consider whether it would help with another part of your work.
You also have a more meaningful career story. You can describe what you noticed, why you acted, and how your thinking shaped the work.
In my experience with clients, some of these patterns also appear in other jobs and outside their careers altogether. The way someone approaches work they enjoy can resemble the way they engage with a hobby, an interest, or another part of life that energizes them.
That is another place to explore the connection between who you are and how you work.
The parts of your career that feel easy may contain experience, judgment, and a way of thinking that you have been overlooking. Taking time to understand them gives you something you can intentionally develop, apply, and speak about with confidence.
