My comparative advantage (the craft of being nice :face_with_open_mouth_vomiting:🤢)

It’s not often you see your CFO holding back tears. It’s even rarer when the reason he’s doing so is because you’re being fired.

No, I wasn’t part of a mass layoff or a restructuring or a merger or anything like that. I just wasn’t very good at my job. We all knew it and I had already been interviewing at other places. The writing was on the wall.

The reason I share this anecdote is to illustrate what I think is one of my comparative advantages, namely that people like me. It’s a pretty boring advantage and I would rather it be something more badass. Say, exceptional stamina, unending drive, clarity of vision, extreme smarts or astronomical productivity. Something tough, something toothy, something real. Instead I’ve got a penchant for dumb jokes, a smile that I can’t control and the ability to read and react to other people’s emotional or psychological state.

I do realize that being affable really does have the potential to be a highly lucrative or powerful advantage, it just feels sort of icky. Maybe that sounds stupid, but when I think about leveraging niceness It brings to mind things like nepotism, schmoozing, insincerity and politics - all things that make my skin crawl. On the other hand if I were a simple math whiz or just really good at working on the same thing day in and day out till it’s done, that would be an honest skill, virtuous and clean, free from the sticky ickiness of human relationships and (gasp) soft skills.

That of course is not actually true. I mean sure, being likeable is not a skill in the same way that building fine furniture or making perfectly honeycombed croissants is. But I wonder if it’s closer than the insecure voice in my head claims.