Skills & Qualifications
Developing The Knack
My friend Brian visited this past weekend, and while walking up my driveway, he shared a recent experience that was totally relatable. His gas fireplace hadn't been working for a couple of years, and he finally decided to have someone come take a look.
He knew it would cost $50 just to get a technician out to the house, but at that point it felt worth it to finally figure out what was going on. The serviceman showed up, looked around for a few minutes, and had it working again almost immediately. There was a switch that hadn't been turned on.
Brian shared how he felt both relieved and a little embarrassed, relieved that it was such a simple fix, and embarrassed that he hadn't figured it out himself. What resonated with me wasn't the simplicity of it. It was how quickly the technician knew where to look.
The Value of Knowing Where to Look
Nobody on site could figure out what was wrong. They tracked down a retired printer who had worked with those presses for decades and talked him into coming in. He walked around for a few minutes, opened a control panel, turned a single screw a quarter turn, and told them the presses would now work.
When the bill arrived, it was for
Turning the screw.....
Knowing which screw to turn..... $9,999.
It's an extreme example, but it captures something that's hard to talk about honestly. We tend to assign value to effort, to time, to visible complexity. But the mechanic's invoice is really an argument about where value comes from. In most professional situations, it's the depth of understanding that lets someone walk into a problem and see it clearly while everyone else is still guessing.
The Quiet Development of a Knack
It's part craft, part instinct, and it doesn't transfer through documentation or instruction. You can't download it. You build it by doing things badly, noticing what went wrong, adjusting, and doing it again. Eventually something starts to click, and you stop needing to think through every step consciously. You start operating from feel. That's the knack.
For a job seeker, the knack you've developed over years of real work is the most defensible value you have. It's what the fireplace guy had. It's what the retired printer had. It's the thing that can't be easily replicated by someone who simply has the same credentials or has read the same books. The question is whether you know what yours is, and whether you're leading with it.
Where This Shows Up in the Search
That instinct is understandable, and it's not entirely wrong. But it can also flatten the thing that makes you distinct, turning your experience into something that reads well on paper but doesn’t stand out in a conversation.
As I see it, the goal is to help someone recognize the specific kind of problem you're especially good at solving, the kind where your experience runs deeper than your credentials suggest, and where your instincts have been sharpened by years of doing it the slow way. That's harder to articulate than a list of responsibilities, but it's the part of you that's also the hardest to replicate.
Two Questions
But the more important question, is what knack you're actively developing right now. The job market isn't standing still, and the most valuable thing you can do during a transition isn't just to package what you already have. It's to stay curious and deliberate about what you're building next.
What are you spending time in that's hard and slow and not yet clicking? What problem are you wrestling with patiently? That's where the next knack lives. The job search is a natural forcing function to get honest about this, because the market will tell you pretty directly whether what you've developed still earns the invoice you think it does.
The mechanic didn't just show up knowing which screw to turn. He got there the slow way. And that's the work.