I just got back from a YouTube conference in Dallas and I’m buzzing with energy.
Meeting other creators is always motivating but one person I met completely changed how I think about success.
He called himself a polymath, and he had the charisma to back it up. At karaoke one night, he sang a song that was so good, a dozen strangers came over to give him high-fives. Later, we started talking about content creation, and he told me he had created over 5,000 videos.
My jaw hit the floor. 5,000. Was I talking to a Mr. Beast in the making?
But when he shared his channel, I was surprised in a different way. He’d been grinding for nearly 8 years, with thousands of videos, and only had a couple hundred subscribers.
Many of his videos had single-digit views. How could an outlier in effort and talent have such dismal results?
It’s because of a hard truth I had to learn myself over 20 years at Amazon.
Nobody cares how hard you work. They only care about the value you create.
The gap between his incredible effort and his disappointing results came down to a concept from the startup world: Product-Market Fit. He had a “product” (his talent and videos) but he never found a market that valued it.
Even if you never want to start a company, this is the most important idea for your career. The most successful people, even deep inside big companies, think of themselves as a company of one. Their mission is to find product-market fit for their skills, and then once that’s discovered, execute ruthlessly against it.
Here’s how they do it.
If you are finding this article useful, you might also enjoy the most popular posts from A Life Engineered this year:
Product-Market fit starts with a painful problem, not a cool idea.
There’s a brilliant book called The Mom Test by Rob Fitzpatrick. The premise is simple: if you ask your mom if your business idea is good, she’ll say yes because she loves you. You get compliments, not data. The book teaches you to stop asking for opinions on your solution and start asking about your customers’ lives to find their real problems.
The same is true in your career. Companies don’t hire people because they have good skills. They hire people to solve expensive, painful problems. In fact, most companies would rather not hire anyone at all. Hiring is a last resort.
My accountant recently told me there’s a nationwide shortage of CPAs. The pain (tax season, audits, complex finances) is real and universal, so the demand for people who can solve that pain is massive. Their rates go up because they are a direct solution to a widespread problem.
The skill is in demand because of the pain. They are in demand because they are a pain-killer, not a vitamin.
I once was asked to help a team at Amazon that was known for buggy code and moving slow. The diagnosis when I was assigned to help was that it was a skills gap. The plan was to create a training program to teach them better engineering practices.
But instead of building a curriculum, I spent a week just watching them work. It turns out that there wasn’t a skills gap. It was a pain gap. Their process for releasing software was a nightmare. A single deployment took days and involved a dozen manual steps and approvals. It was so heavyweight that changes were clubbed together, increasing the chances that any particular release had issues. It wasn’t because they were bad engineers, it was because the process was so painful.
If you’re looking for work, make sure you’re clear about what pain they are trying to alleviate with their job opening. If you have a job, find the pain points at work.
Actionable Advice: Apply “The Mom Test” to Your Boss. Your boss is your first and most important customer. But if you simply ask them, “Am I doing a good job?” You’ll get a polite answer. Instead, find their pain. In your next 1-on-1, ask questions like:
“What’s the most frustrating part of your week?”
“What’s the biggest thing slowing our team down right now?”
“If you could wave a magic wand and solve one problem, what would it be?”
Listen for their frustration. The answer to those questions is your market. Solving that problem is your product.
So you’ve found a painful problem. Maybe there’s no shortage of pain points where you work.
The impulse is to jump in and build a quick solution. But that’s a short-term fix. That’s just one transaction.
The real next step is to ask: What skill, if I mastered it, would solve this class of problem forever?
Your long-term value isn’t in a single solution. It’s in your capacity to solve problems. Your skills are the product you are developing and selling to the market. You have to build the tool, and that tool is you.
Let’s go back to that team with the nightmare deployment process. When I talked with them, it was obvious they were smart. They knew the process was terrible. The real problem was that they were trying to shield their managers and stakeholders from the messy technical details. They kept saying “We’re working on it,” but they never got the time and space to actually fix the deep-rooted issues.
My unique skill wasn’t in guiding them towards continuous development. It was in translating technical pain into business impact. I showed them how to frame the problem not as “our deployment pipeline is complex,” but as “we are losing two developer-weeks of productivity per month to this process, which is delaying our feature launch by a quarter.”
I guided them what to say in meetings but stayed silent, forcing them to deliver the message. Suddenly, leadership understood. The team got the bandwidth they needed because the pain was surfaced with just enough technical detail.
(This is the kind of skill—surfacing critical technical challenges to help the business —that I teach people in my Speedrun to Promotion program, which helps people get to the next level in record time.)
My ability to diagnose the root cause and empower the team came from a core part of who I am. I believe in teaching people how to fish. The most powerful skills are extensions of your personality. The product you’re building isn’t a generic one. It’s uniquely yours.
Actionable Advice: Find Your “Effortless” Skill. Your most valuable skills feel so natural you don’t even see them as skills. To uncover them, ask yourself these three questions:
What kind of problem am I naturally drawn to? Are you the person who organizes chaos, the one who untangles complex technical mysteries, or the one who naturally mediates team conflicts?
What activity gives me energy while draining others? Think about public speaking, mentoring a junior colleague, or building a detailed project plan from scratch. The thing you do that makes others say “I don’t know how you do that” is a clue.
What compliment do I brush off because it felt “easy”? When someone thanks you for explaining something clearly or for staying calm under pressure, your instinct might be to say “it was nothing.” It wasn’t nothing. It was you using your core skill.
The pattern in your answers points to your most authentic “product.” That’s the core of your product-market fit.
Nobody cares how hard you work.
This is brutally true when your effort is aimed at the wrong target. It’s invisible because it creates no value. But something magical happens once you find a fit. Once you connect your unique skill to a real pain point, people suddenly care a great deal about how hard you work.
Why? Because your effort now has leverage. Every hour you invest is directly solving a problem. Your hard work becomes a measure of how much pain you are removing from their lives.
I once spent weeks refactoring a codebase. I love that kind of work. It’s satisfying to clean things up. At the end, the code was cleaner, but it didn’t change anything for our customers or our business. Nobody cared.
A few weeks later, I spent a couple of hours writing a simple script to automate a tedious task for the support team. It saved them hours of mind-numbing work every week. Suddenly, I was a hero. You better believe I immediately started looking for more scripts I could write to help everyone I could. These scripts eventually made their way into the code base.
This is the moment to put in the reps.
Actionable Advice: Create “The Value Loop.” A one-time fix makes you helpful. A repeatable process makes you essential. Once you find a successful fit, your job is to turn it into a loop that pulls more opportunities toward you.
Solve for One: Find one person with a nagging problem and apply your unique skill to solve it completely. Focus on delivering a clear, undeniable win for that single person.
Generalize the Solution: Take your one-off solution and turn it into a reusable tool, a template, or a documented process that others can use. Turn your ad-hoc script into a tool anyone can run.
Announce the Product: Tell the story of the solution. Share it in a team meeting or a public channel. Frame it simply: “Here was a common pain. Here is a new tool that solves it. Here is how you can use it.” This doesn’t just solve one problem. It announces that you are the person who solves this class of problem, attracting more opportunities to you.
The polymath I met at that conference was talented, kind, and one of the hardest workers I’ve ever met. But his 5,000 videos were a product without a market. His incredible effort was aimed at a pain nobody felt.
Outlier success isn’t about working harder, it’s about the relentless search for a fit between what you can uniquely do and what the world truly values.
Start selling your solutions.
Enjoyed this week’s newsletter? Give it a ❤️ so I know to write similar ones in the future.
Casey Muratori walked away from college after a high school internship at Microsoft and went on to build animation systems used in many of games, like Baldur’s Gate, Elder Scrolls, and Age of Empires. In this conversation, he explains why clean code principles destroy performance, demonstrates his unconventional interview technique that ditches Leetcode entirely, and shares why he thinks IP theft from LLMs is the real issue everyone should be talking about instead of AI hype.