Your Fire
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Where the Assessment Placed Me
1 minWrite your quadrant from the free assessment here. It gets stated once, and then we move past it — the next three days are about what the ten questions could not tell you.
The Fire Trace
18 minThree moments, drawn deliberately from different periods of your life. Do not generalise yet. Fill in the moments first; the pattern comes after.
If you finish today with the words impact, helping people, growth or leadership on your page, the work has not been done. Those are true of everybody. Half a coordinate has to be specific enough to exclude somebody.
The Pattern Pass
4 minRead the three moments side by side. Everything before this was gathering material — this is the exercise.
Name Three
6 minReduce to exactly three interests. Each one written as a verb phrase, not a category.
One word is not an answer. Not “strategy” but taking something tangled and making it simple enough to act on.
The exclusion test: would this be true of the person sitting next to you in your last meeting? If yes, go back and get specific.
The One You Edited Out
4 minWhich of those three moments did you almost not write down — because it felt unserious, or too long ago, or nothing to do with your career? Write down why you nearly left it out.
“You've just named your Fire. So why hasn't it been enough on its own?”
Your Forge
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Natural strengths. What has always come more easily to you than to the people around you.
Learned skills. What you deliberately went and acquired. It counts fully.
Developed expertise. Depth built over years in a domain — often the strongest thing a senior professional has, and the one most often left off the page.
The Evidence Inventory
14 minSeven prompts. No witness, no entry. There is nowhere on this page to rate yourself — you are the least reliable witness you have, so every answer asks what other people did.
That belongs here too. This is developed expertise, and it is deliberately given its own prompt.
Unpack the Labels
8 minThis is the step most likely to change your answer. Any answer above that is a category word — leadership, communication, strategy, management, people skills — has to be broken open.
Not “leadership,” but: communicating ideas clearly · writing and storytelling · performing and connecting with an audience · interviewing people and drawing out their stories · leading and convening people · building relationships and coalitions · administering complex projects and making sure details are completed · holding people accountable and driving work to completion · firing people up around a shared goal · public transportation expertise built over thirty years.
Your Abilities — Long List
6 minWrite down up to eight. Nothing is wasted — the ones you don't carry into tomorrow's grid stay here, and they come with you into The Expedition if you go on.
Reduce to Three
6 minThree go into tomorrow's grid. Each keeps its evidence line attached. For each one you cut, write a single line saying why.
Which of these did you nearly not write down because it felt too obvious to count? In Paul's experience, that one is usually the real ability.
The Thing You Brush Off
4 minWhat do people thank you for that you brush off? Write down the last time it happened, and exactly what you said in reply. Then ask why you needed to make it smaller.
“Two lists, six lines. What could any of them build together?”
Where
They Cross
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Media + interviewing + transportation expertise = Transit Unplugged. Politics and governing + leadership, administration and accountability = elected office and county government. Media + writing + motivating others = this book. Performing music + stage presence and audience connection = performing in bands. Politics and governing + convening and coalitions + transportation expertise = CEO roundtables and industry alliances.
Every one of those is a recognisable activity, platform or role — not a dot on a grid and not two words next to each other. If it is an adjective, it is not an answer.
Work the Nine
18 minCarry your three interests from Day 1 down the left and your three abilities from Day 2 across the top. At each square: when I apply this ability to this interest, what could I do, create, contribute or make happen?
Squares may be marked “nothing here” — but every square gets visited. People are regularly surprised by the square they assumed was nothing.
| My Abilities · 1 | My Abilities · 2 | My Abilities · 3 | |
|---|---|---|---|
| My Interests · 1 | |||
| My Interests · 2 | |||
| My Interests · 3 |
The Five Tests
8 minTake the two or three strongest squares and score them side by side. The choice gets made on evidence rather than mood.
| Test | A | B | C |
|---|---|---|---|
| Does this energise me? | |||
| Am I especially good at it? | |||
| Is there evidence from my life that this combination is real? | |||
| Does it create value for other people? | |||
| Is there a realistic way to do more of it? |
Your Working X Factor Hypothesis
4 minThis is a working hypothesis, never a final answer. The seven-day test exists to confirm it, sharpen it, or reveal that one of the other eight squares was stronger. You have found a promising intersection — a credible first version of your X Factor.
Book the Week
8 minThe test has to use the intersection, not make room for it. Each shape below is an act of doing the combination in the real world, with a witness or an output.
Day, time and duration go in the calendar, not in the intention. That single step is the difference between a hypothesis you tested and one you thought about.
The Square You Scored Highest
4 minLook at the square you scored highest and ask yourself honestly — is there a reason you have never done this? Not a logistical reason. The other kind. You don't have to answer it yet.
“You have a credible first version. Seven days from now you'll know whether it holds.”
Your Starting
Coordinates
Starting Coordinates
Working copy · Day 3Complete · Day 10Six fields are yours today. The seventh needs a week of evidence behind it. Switch this page to the Day 10 version once you have run your experiment.
This page is finished, and it carries forward intact. Your interests, your abilities, your working hypothesis and what the week actually showed you — that is where The Expedition begins, and nothing here gets retyped.
What did I actually do? · What changed — in the work, in the room, or in me? · What did I learn about the combination? · Did this confirm the hypothesis, sharpen it, or point me to a different square?
