The Contrarian

You test ideas by attacking them, including your own, and you are fast enough to do it in real time. Given a consensus you will locate the assumption everyone skipped, and you will say so, usually with a joke attached. It makes you extremely valuable in the room where something is being decided, because you find the flaw while it is still cheap to fix. You are also far less attached to your own positions than people assume — the argument is the method, not the identity.

The cost is that other people cannot tell the difference between you stress-testing an idea and you dismissing them. You leave a trail of conversations where you were technically right and something was nonetheless damaged, and you notice it later than you should. The other weakness is completion. The problem is most interesting before it is solved, so once the hard thinking is done your interest drops off a cliff, and you have a history of handing over things that were nearly finished.