What should I do with a highly valuable unique ability that is consistently unused? [closed]

Question

Many people have unique valuable abilities that they do not know what to do with. This question is not about my specific situation. I am asking a general question and providing my situation as an example to help make the general question easier to understand.

In my case, I have the ability to work with meaning in source code. I have never met or heard of someone else able to do this. That is why I am so alone. This ability has the potential to provide benefits to thousands of companies, teams, customers, products, services etc. I have developed techniques for doing this work over the last 25 years including over 10,000 hours working with these techniques, and yet when I use this skill on the job, talk about this, show my work, promote my approach, look for collaborators, etc. all I get is blank stares and all I hear is crickets. I think my approach would be the right tool for the job about 15% of the time.

I have no experience doing anything but being an employee. I am a complete novice at other kinds of work, but would be willing to look into something else that makes a lot of sense. What do you recommend?

Many people have unique valuable skills that are not being used. I want answers that address this problem in preference to answers that address my own particular situation. I want this question to benefit others.

Specifics:

I provide these specifics as an example so that people can understand the question better. I am interested in an answer to the general problem that many people have.

I have developed a data type that can store a permutation of concepts. I call this an endeme. This data type can be used as rich metadata for any entity. The permutation aspect of this data type allows a programmer to identify how important each concept is for that entity. The concept aspect of this data type allows a programmer to program the app's interaction. As an example, given the top 20 pizza toppings, which are your three favorite ones in order of how much you like them? Your answer to that question is a simple endeme. Endeme sets are the sets of concepts from which endemes are constructed. In this case the set would be the list of pizza toppings.

Multiple endemes can be used to characterize pieces of data, thus turning them into information by describing what they mean within the context of the application or situation. I see information as being data that has meaning.

Thank You all for Your Input

Some of it has been hard to hear and some of it has been useful. Given your input, I think there is something intuitive that I don't quite know how to express yet, and that may be useful to present at some point when it finally surfaces. And I will work to present examples. The importance of that has been reiterated. None the less, I do want answers that will benefit other people who have this problem also.

Answer 1

I have the ability to work with meaning in source code. I have never met or heard of someone else able to do this.

This depends on your definition of "meaning". Just because you establish a meaning of the source code (which is just instructions on how to process or handle data, by the way) doesn't mean to work with that meaning.

I think my approach would be the right tool for the job about 15% of the time.

As a dev team lead, my immediate thought to this line is, "Well, what are you using for the other 85% of the time?"

To be blunt, this is characteristic of a developer who has a great solution but no real problem to solve. At least yet. The problem that you're running into is that you're desperately looking for that problem to solve with your solution.

I don't make recommendations to hire people based on the fact that they have a Solution™ to a problem. I recommend that people be hired based on their ability to solve a problem. So if this were me, I'd be seriously questioning your ability to focus and what you're doing, exactly.

Your concept does feel like it exists already; there are data structures and other metadata capturing tools/patterns that exist to cover this. Unless you're actively building one of those kinds of solutions or services, another gut reaction of mine would be to ask how much it'd cost to maintain or support, since You as a developer are expensive per hour and can do a lot more different things, versus a license with dedicated support, which is less expensive per hour and is only needed in that one context.

What do you recommend?

Solve the problems that are asked of you to solve, and do so in a way that doesn't leave the room with blank stares. Work with your colleagues on this and don't presume to own or know more than anyone in the room. There's nothing worse than a solution to a problem that winds up being more complex or costly to maintain than the original problem.

Answer 2

You think you have a great idea but it's not catching on and you don't get any traction. There are a few potential root causes

1. Your idea is not as relevant to real world problems as you think it is,
2. You are not explaining it in a way that people understand the benefits, or
3. You are talking to the wrong people: either at the wrong spot on the org chart or people that simply don't have the problem you are solving

What do you recommend?

That really depends on the root cause. For example if there is a communication problem you can work on

1. Creating a coherent and concise story about what it is and what how it does
2. Be clear about what specific real world problem it's solving and why it does indeed solve the problems. Why is better than the status quo or other alternatives?
3. Present quantitative data, case studies, or real world examples that back up your claims.
4. Make sure you understand the reference frame of the person you are talking to. What's their background, what's their skill set, what are their priorities and why would they potentially care about your idea? Tailor your communication to this background.
5. Articulate the benefits. If any possible, do this quantitatively (cost, time to market, increased revenue, etc.) and make sure the benefits are relevant to your audience.

Answer 3

I have the ability to work with meaning in source code. I have never met or heard of someone else able to do this.

Information Theory is an incredibly broad field, and I'd expect you to have published papers in this field if you've got ideas that are so revolutionary that only your mind could have formulated them.

Us programmers are generally an introverted bunch. We'd much prefer to sit down at our desk, read, and try out a library rather than talk about it. The fact you don't have any example code in your library is an instant red flag. I'm not going to bother wasting my time trying to figure out what it does.

I have crushing anxiety when I try to build examples.

Nobody cares about your crushing anxiety. They aren't going to magically understand your library cause you wave the "crushing anxiety" flag.

You were told over 8 months ago that the lack of examples is a barrier to people using your library.

You have not added examples in that time, citing mental health issues.

It sounds like your mental health issues are the real problem that needs to be addressed here.

Answer 4

"Unique" is not a synonym for "Useful" or "Valuable", if your "unique" skill is truly one or both of those things then you need to be able to convince others of that. Otherwise what you have is like the ability to be invisible so long as no-one is watching - i.e. pointless.

I'll try to get too bogged down in the technical details here - this is Workplace SE after all not one of the technical stacks, but I apologize to any non-technical readers for the mention of scary things like "Building" and "Github".

I had a skim through your blog, and it was big on grandiose statements suggesting that "Endemes" were the missing link, the thing that was going to revolutionise how we worked with data and information. Not going to lie - I'm getting some Zuckerbot-esque "Metaverse!" vibes here, not a good start.

As for the actual technical details, well they're curiously absent, the advantages/disadvantages list makes some more grandiose promises and contrasts them with some very real concerns for how such a data structure might fare in the real world. There's some random jottings of ideas you could do with "Level 3", complaints that software programming isn't "complete" because we can't do "Level 4"?

OK.. if I'm looking at this as something for a real world problem I'm facing, I'm already gone. The browser tab has been closed and I'm never thinking of "Endemes" again.

But this is a TWP answer so let's just assume that I'm still interested enough to move to the next step, so I download the project files from your github and crank up Visual Studio, load the project and hit Ctrl-Shift-B and....

BUILD FAILED

Oh dear. Any slight shred of hope that I might keep looking at this if this were the Real World has gone whimpering out of the door. If I'm going to have to spend time wrangling and debugging someone's library just to get the damn thing to build then feck it, I might as well do it myself instead.

But (grits teeth) this is a TWP answer not the the Real World, so let's look at the error list, a few missing files excluded from the project and a few "Tests" that referenced them commented out later and hurrah!

BUILD SUCCEEDED

I mean I have no idea whether what I trimmed out is actually needed anywhere but at least it builds now so I can get cracking. Except.. what now? I still don't really know how to actually use an Endeme, skimming the comments in the files doesn't help any, they mainly seem to repeat the word Endeme in various permutations like I already know what that means. There's "README" files that aren't worth the diskspace they take up, single lines that do nothing but state pointless things like

The core of InfoLib is the Endemes folder.

and

The Endemes folder contains classes that work with the 'lowest' level of information (rather than just data).

So there's no (useful) documentation, no examples, absolutely nothing that gives me the faintest clue where to go from here, I poke around a bit in Intellisense and nothing obvious leaps out.

So maybe you have come up with something really special, or maybe it's a complete boondoggle. I can't tell, and more importantly I no longer care.

Your "Unique" skill has failed to argue the case that it's either "Useful" or "Valuable" and uniqueness has no value on it's own not to mention I have pretty steep reservations about it even being unique.

So what are your next steps?

If you believe that your datatype and concept are useful and valuable then what you need to do is drop the pretension, and do like they taught you in school - show your working. Start simple, and go from there - if it's going to change the world and the way we think about data and information then it'll need to actually get into the hands of people who are working with that information, and as it stands it's dead in the water.

Answer 5

I would suggest that the op would see a licensed therapist that would help them to get a grip on their problems.

This answer is given in light that the op has mentioned having autism in their previous question: How can I find work in a new sub-field that I have invented for my profession?.

I think other answers miss this point by giving suggestions (however excellent they might be), which simply might not click with the op. Whereas a professional therapist might find a way to get through to them in a way they understand. This, of course, will take some time.