In three days, name what you’re actually made of
Three interests, traced to real moments. Three abilities, each with someone else’s name against it as evidence. One place they cross — and then seven days of using it, to find out whether it holds.
You finish with a one-page document written by you, about you, in your own words. Not a personality type. Not a report someone else generated.
Taken the free assessment? Good — day one starts by putting your result on the map. Haven’t taken it? That’s fine too. It takes two minutes and you can do it before or after you start.
Take the free assessment →Half a coordinate
is not a location
Two things decide what you’re for. What repeatedly draws you in, and what you can do especially well. Your interests and your abilities.
Almost everyone can gesture at both. Very few can state either one specifically enough to act on. “I like helping people and I’m good with people” is not a position on any map — it’s a shrug in two parts, and it’s true of everybody in your last meeting.
Two specific answers, and you can find the spot. That’s the whole of these three days.
Three real moments from three different parts of your life, mined for what they share.
You don’t get asked what you love — people answer that with what sounds respectable. You get asked what actually happened.
The harder day. You are the least reliable witness to your own abilities, so nothing here asks you to rate yourself.
Every prompt asks what other people did. And the word “leadership” doesn’t count as an answer.
Interests and abilities don’t cross by themselves. You work all nine combinations, one at a time.
Then filter the strongest, name one hypothesis, and book it into next week.
This is the part most courses leave out. You don’t finish with a conclusion — you finish with a hypothesis and an appointment. One hour in your real week, doing the thing, with a witness or an output. Then four questions, and your page is done.
Evidence first.
Conclusion second.
Ask a capable person what they’re good at and you’ll get a category word. Ask what somebody thanked them for last month and you’ll get something true. Every exercise in these three days is built on that difference.
Abilities come with a witness: who, when, and what they actually said or did. No witness, no entry.
Not “strategic” but taking something tangled and making it simple enough to act on. If it would be true of the person next to you, it goes back for another pass.
Nothing is submitted, scored or reviewed. One line at the end of day three, and that is the only thing anyone else sees.
Paul shows you his own grid, filled in, including the six combinations that produced nothing.
People who are already good at what they do. Senior leaders, managers, executives — with a track record and a title that means something.
And specifically for the problem those people have, which isn’t a lack of capability. It’s that the capability got pointed somewhere by circumstance rather than by choice, and it has been running that direction for fifteen or twenty years.
It won’t tell you to quit your job. It won’t hand you a four-letter type and call it an identity. It won’t do the work for you — there is no version of this where you watch some videos and arrive somewhere.
And it won’t make you happy. It will make you clearer, and clarity is uncomfortable for a while before it becomes useful.
Paul Comfort
CEO of one of America’s largest transit systems. Elected public official. Adjunct graduate faculty at Villanova. Now Senior Vice President and Chief Customer Officer at Modaxo, the world’s largest public transportation technology company.
Producer and host of Transit Unplugged, the industry’s leading podcast and award-winning TV show — more than 500 episodes and over 11 million views. Bestselling author of Find Your X Factor.
He teaches this the only honest way available: by showing you his own worked grid, including the parts that came to nothing, and by being specific about what three days can and cannot give you.
“Find Your X Factor dares readers to look inward and discover the perfect intersection of their passions, natural abilities, and unique strengths.”
Book review · findyourxfactor.ai
The course is built on the book’s method. You don’t need to have read it to do the three days.
These three days find your coordinates. There is a longer programme — The Expedition — that takes them further, into your values, the conditions you work best in, your own story, the obstacles actually in your way, and a thirty-day plan. It comes second because it has to. Your $19.95 credits against it in full if you go on.
Decide later
Three days, then
a real week
These three days find your coordinates. There is a longer programme — The Expedition — that takes them further, into your values, the conditions you work best in, your own story, the obstacles actually in your way, and a thirty-day plan. It comes second because it has to. Your $19.95 credits against it in full if you go on.
Decide later
Three days, then
a real week
Self-paced — each day unlocks when you finish the one before it, not on a calendar. If the week gets away from you, the course waits.
One condition, and it’s the only one: write what is true rather than what is respectable. Nobody is reading it, so there is no reason to perform — and a flattering answer produces a result that belongs to someone who doesn’t exist.
Self-paced — each day unlocks when you finish the one before it, not on a calendar. If the week gets away from you, the course waits.
One condition, and it’s the only one: write what is true rather than what is respectable. Nobody is reading it, so there is no reason to perform — and a flattering answer produces a result that belongs to someone who doesn’t exist.
