Your 'Weird' Obsessions Are Your Best Career Asset

Stop being a commodity in a crowded market

We all have something that feels like play to us but work to others. Yet, instead of leaning into that, we go to school to learn how to be exactly like everyone else.

People graduate expecting the market to eagerly hire them for their newfound knowledge, only to face a harsh reality. They enter a talent pool flooded with thousands of others holding the same qualification, and they quickly realise that nobody actually cares about their degree, and they are not special.

Here is the brutal truth: the moment a skill fits neatly into a course syllabus and a certificate, you signal to the world that anyone can acquire it. And if anyone can learn it, someone, somewhere, will do it cheaper than you. You have officially made yourself a commodity.

When we start working, many people never outgrow their initial roles or pivot. The best form of pivot is leveraging your interests. Look for the things your peers hate, but you love and enjoy. Whatever that interest is, it can become the foundation of your next career pivot. For me, it is structuring documents and writing research reports; while others dread the task, I can happily do it all day.

If you are good at it, you will end up being better than everyone else simply because you are doing it for fun, while others are doing it for work. Eventually, when the quick results don’t materialise, the people treating it like a job will tire out and give up.

This is where your advantage kicks in. The professional world is a brutally efficient place, and the market is completely saturated. Whatever your career is, there are thousands of people doing exactly what you do.

To survive that kind of competition and play at the top of the food chain, you have to be irrationally passionate. The people who win aren’t just doing it for the money. They are patient enough to stay the course, experimenting and iterating until they become exceptional.

The key differentiator in a marketplace full of people with the same qualifications as you is having unique knowledge. This is the kind of knowledge that goes beyond academic qualifications. You can’t be formally trained for it. It only comes through following your curiosities, learning and doing things you genuinely enjoy. Once all is said and done, the dots start connecting, and this unique knowledge becomes tied to who you are, and you become the subject matter expert.

If you follow the standard path, you will get standard results, and nobody pays top dollar for standard results that everyone else has. Genuine curiosity will take you down a path that is odd and specific, and no one else has been there. The market pays for what is both rare and useful. Most people focus too much on being useful and forget to be rare, yet being useful alone can be mass-trained to 100,000 other people.

After graduating with a degree in Anthropology, I didn’t know what to do with my career. All I knew was that I liked to read and write. I started my career in business development, but I did more research on clients than actual business development. I was fortunate enough to have a boss who trained me in his way of thinking and gave me a book to improve my selling skills: The New Solution Selling by Keith M. Eades.

It totally changed my life, teaching me how to think like a “solutioneer.” He also taught me the Improvement Kata, which teaches systematic thinking and problem-solving. The combination of these two drew me more into research than selling. I found the process of building problem-solving frameworks fascinating, so I pivoted and started looking for research jobs.

I got hired as a researcher for an IT company. While doing research, I started solving the sales team’s problems based on the principles I had learned from my previous job. Soon, all I wanted to learn about was problem-solving skills, research, and scientific thinking. Working as a researcher for the IT company got me hired to work as an anthropologist for a B2B marketing agency. Doing ethnographic research for the B2B agency got me hired to work under the Group CEO of a consulting company as a research consultant, doing projects across Africa, because I understood people.

Some argue it’s job-hopping, I call it pivoting.

Years later, I have combined my research experiences and my general interests in systematic thinking into my current role in Strategy and Operations. I work with devs, data scientists, sales and marketing teams to bridge the gap between complex technical systems, human behaviour and build frameworks that solve problems across the entire business.

The best way to acquire this niche knowledge is to pay attention to your rabbit holes. My career wasn’t built on a single degree; it was built on a series of obsessions, from my interest in reading, to anthropology to mastering critical thinking. Now, my current fascination is with dissecting how great thinkers structure their ideas and also learning about theories that apply in business and daily life. You never stop layering these interests.

So, how do you apply this?

If you are starting out in your career, don’t specialise too soon. Do the job they pay you for, but stay fiercely curious about the adjacent problems no one else wants to touch and open yourself up to new challenges.

If you are a senior with an established career, your next leap won’t come from doing the same thing harder. It will come from creating value by integrating your outside obsessions into your daily work.

Your ultimate career leverage lies in your distinctive mix of skills. The market is heavily saturated with professionals who possess mass-produced useful skills, but is highly starved of unique talents.

Your edge isn’t outside you, it’s inside what you’re obsessed with.