By Stanley Ngugi, October 19th, 2025
You've heard it before. "Work hard." "Be yourself." "Hire great people." "Focus on your strengths."
When someone successful gives this advice, there's often an uncomfortable feeling that follows. Either they're gatekeeping the real secrets, or they're so far removed from the struggle that they've forgotten what actually matters. But after years in AI research and watching patterns across different fields, I think there's a third explanation that's simultaneously more mundane and more important: they're telling the truth, but the truth requires something they can't transmit through advice alone.
There's no secret ingredient. I've come to believe this pretty firmly. When you ask highly successful people what made the difference, they often give you the same answers everyone does: work consistently, find what you're good at, surround yourself with talented people, stay curious. And they're not lying or hiding anything. They genuinely did those things.
The problem is that "focus on your strengths" is useless advice if you don't actually know what your strengths are. And most people don't.
In high school, I was mediocre at best. I struggled with rote memorization, couldn't retain formulas for tests, and generally felt like I was fighting uphill against a system designed for people whose brains worked differently than mine. Then I got into research, specifically AI research, and something clicked. Pattern recognition, connecting disparate concepts, seeing structural similarities across domains—suddenly I was thriving.
Nothing about my intelligence changed. What changed was the match between how my brain naturally operates and what the environment rewarded.
This is the key distinction: in structured, well-defined domains, you can succeed without self-awareness because the system does the matching for you.
If you're naturally good at memorization, traditional schooling rewards you automatically. You don't need to understand why you're good at it or develop a sophisticated model of your own cognition. You just do what's asked, and you succeed. The feedback is clear, the metrics are standardized, and there's usually one right answer.
But in unstructured domains—entrepreneurship, research, creative work, anything with high degrees of freedom and ambiguous success criteria—suddenly that automatic optimization breaks down. There isn't one test to be good at. There are multiple paths, unclear metrics, delayed feedback, and no guarantee that what worked for someone else will work for you.
This is where self-awareness becomes load-bearing.
Research suggests about 95% of people think they're self-aware, but only 10-15% actually are. That gap is staggering. It means the vast majority of people are operating with fundamentally incorrect models of their own abilities, weaknesses, and impact.
When a successful person says "just focus on your strengths," they've already solved the hard problem: they know what their strengths are. They've figured out whether they're better at:
For someone without self-awareness, "focus on your strengths" translates to "keep doing what I've always done" or "do what prestigious people do" or "work harder at my weaknesses." None of these is what the advice meant.
Here's what's important: this isn't a universal law. Some people succeed without self-awareness because they happen to be naturally optimized for their chosen field. The person with an excellent memory who becomes a doctor, the natural salesperson who goes into business development, the spatial thinker who becomes an architect—they might never need deep self-reflection because they stumbled into the right match early.
Self-awareness becomes critical primarily in two situations:
In traditional corporate settings with clear hierarchies and defined roles, you can go surprisingly far on raw competence alone. In startups, research labs, creative fields, or anywhere the problems are novel and the solutions are uncertain, you need to know how you work.
What makes this tricky is that self-awareness and environment interact. When you understand your cognitive style and choose environments that reward it, you get positive feedback that reinforces your natural tendencies. You improve faster, you're more motivated, you notice subtler patterns in your work.
Someone without self-awareness who's in the wrong environment gets the opposite: constant friction, slow improvement, a nagging sense that they're not quite getting it. They might conclude they're not smart enough, when really they're just playing the wrong game.
I spent years thinking I wasn't good at learning. Turns out I'm excellent at learning—just not through memorization. I learn through pattern recognition, through seeing the same structure in different contexts, through building mental models. Once I figured that out and structured my learning accordingly, everything changed.
If you're in a field with clear metrics and structured progression, you might not need much self-awareness. Execute well, follow the playbook, and you'll probably be fine.
But if you're in entrepreneurship, research, art, or any domain where success is ambiguous and paths are multiple, the single most important thing you can do is figure out how you actually work:
These aren't philosophical questions. They're diagnostic questions. The answers tell you where to point yourself.
This is why successful people give "obvious" advice. They did the obvious things—worked hard, focused on strengths, stayed persistent. But they did them with accurate self-knowledge, which allowed them to:
They can't transmit that self-knowledge through advice. They can describe what they did, but they can't give you the map of your own cognitive architecture. You have to build that yourself through exposure, experimentation, and honest reflection on what actually works for you versus what you wish worked.
None of this is clean or universal. Some people need structure, others need chaos. Some people do their best work in short intense bursts, others need long stretches of uninterrupted time. Some people think best while moving, others while sitting still.
The generic advice works, but only once you've figured out your specific implementation of it. And that's the work no one else can do for you.
There's no secret. But there is self-knowledge. And in unstructured domains, that might be the closest thing to a competitive advantage that actually exists.
I'm an AI researcher who spent years trying to succeed at memorization before realizing I'm a pattern recognition thinker. Your mileage will vary—and that's exactly the point.