One way I've heard of realizing what you're good at is to consider, "What are other people weirdly bad at?"

For me, the answer is writing. I can't tell you how many people I've heard say that writing is hard for them. For me, I'm grateful that words usually flow pretty easily. I don't know exactly why this is, but I think it has a lot to do with a lifetime of reading for pleasure, and a habit of writing at least somewhat regularly.

Obviously, writing helps me convey messages to others in more sophisticated ways than I might be able to in a video, for example. But there's a surprising additional benefit. It both clarifies my thinking and helps me discover what I believe in doing so.

One way to understand this is that my short-term memory doesn't have a lot in it at one time. I'm not juggling multiple ideas. In fact, I can generally only think about one thing at a time. The cool thing about writing about a topic is that the haze of fleeting ideas in my brain is crystallized into language. I have to make decisions about how to articulate these ideas, and sentences are the result of those decisions. Often, I am a little surprised about what comes out onto the page: after all, those sentences weren't in my brain in that form until I wrote them.

With the advent and soon-to-be ubiquity of AI, there's good news for the lazy and philistinic among you: you will be able to get through life perfectly well without being able to write. Paul Graham, one of the founders of Y Combinator, has a lot more to say about this in this essay. But if you don't write, the haze in your brain remains hazy. You will be missing out on the chance to organize your thoughts and actually discover what some of them are for the first time.

I always urge people to write down things in GRE prep - especially their explanations of verbal questions. Spoiler: this makes you better at all verbal questions. It forces you to put words to your thoughts, which in turn forces you to make decisions about why things are right or wrong, which in turn forces you to pick specific reasons for those decisions. Doing this will also enable you to get feedback on those decisions, which will give you new insight, since the person giving feedback will actually be able to see what you're thinking.

This is also helpful for your study plan and strategies. Get those things in your own words.

There's a reason why people with ideas tend to have Substacks. Not only does it help them communicate - it helps them think and discover the shape and boundaries of those ideas. Even if you're not good at writing right now, the habit of writing something daily will improve your skill, as will reading good writing.