Your Rarity Is Not What You Think It Is
You know you are good at what you do. That is not the problem. The problem is you have no idea whether "good" means top 10% or top 1%. Whether the thing you consider a basic part of your job is actually the thing that makes your profile nearly impossible to replace. Whether the credential you barely mention is the one that separates you from 400 other candidates. You have a sense. An instinct. But you have never had the information to know for sure. So you estimate. And then you make career decisions based on that estimate.
The reason you do not know is not a lack of effort or self-awareness. It is a visibility problem. You measure yourself against what you can see. The colleague you worked alongside for three years. The candidate who got the role you wanted. The peer who mentioned their compensation over drinks. That is your dataset. Five people, maybe ten. And from that, you have built an entire understanding of where you sit in the market. Meanwhile, the actual market is 200 candidates you have never met, in cities you have not considered, with overlapping profiles you did not know existed. You are drawing conclusions from a sample size that would not survive a freshman statistics class.
You lead with what feels safe. The years. The scope. The names. Everyone does. And it makes sense because those are the things the industry has trained you to value. But rarity does not come from any single line on a resume. It comes from combinations. A yacht captain who also holds a helicopter license and has managed full refit projects is not just an experienced captain. That is a profile that might exist four or five times in the entire market. A family office director who has built two offices from inception, speaks three languages, and has a background in institutional asset management before crossing into the private side is not just senior. That profile barely exists. The mistake is treating each of those elements as a separate credential when the power is in the combination. And the reason people miss it is because from the inside, it does not feel special. It just feels like your career. The collection of things you happened to do, in the order you happened to do them. You do not see the pattern because you are standing inside it.
When you misread your own rarity, you do not make one bad decision. You make a series of reasonable ones that all point in the wrong direction. You apply for roles that are not competitive for you because the title matched. You skip roles that were built for you because the description did not sound like what you do. You negotiate from a position of gratitude instead of a position of scarcity because you genuinely believed there were fifty people who could replace you. There were three. And each of those decisions felt rational at the time. That is the part that makes it expensive. It does not feel like a mistake. It feels like being practical. Being realistic. Not overreaching. And years later, you look back and realize that "being realistic" cost you more than any risk would have.
The reason you cannot accurately assess your own rarity is the same reason a surgeon cannot operate on themselves. Perspective requires distance. You have been inside your career for ten, fifteen, twenty years. You know what it feels like. You know what it cost you. You know every late night, every impossible situation, every time you held something together that nobody saw. But feeling it is not the same as seeing it from the outside. From the outside, someone can look at the full landscape and say, here are the 300 people in the market with a similar title, and here is why only nine of them can do what you do. You cannot do that math from inside your own experience because you only have one data point. Yours.
Last time, I wrote about the difference between being prepared and being informed. This is about something even more fundamental. The question you answer, consciously or not, before any of that begins. How replaceable am I? Most people answer that question with a feeling. A rough sense shaped by limited information and quiet comparison. And then they build entire career strategies on top of it. That is not a character flaw. That is what happens when the data does not exist. It exists now. rouka covers over 1,000 roles across 10 sectors in 140 markets. It will tell you how rare your profile actually is, what drives that rarity, and what it means for the decisions in front of you.