Johnson's analysis of successful career disruptions reveals a consistent pattern: the people who move most powerfully onto new S-curves are those who identify and pursue curves where their distinctive strengths give them a genuine, hard-to-replicate advantage. Distinctive strengths are different from generic skills. Generic skills are things everyone in your field has: they are the floor, not the differentiator. Distinctive strengths are the specific combination of capabilities, experiences, and character traits that make you harder to substitute. The combination that is hardest to replicate is often not the most spectacular individual skill but the connection between two things that rarely appear together: a consultant who also has deep operational experience, a creative person with unusually strong analytical capability, a technical specialist who is also a genuine leader of people. The intersection of unlikely skills is where genuine differentiation lives. Johnson also includes personal experience as a distinctive strength. Someone who has navigated a specific challenge, who has lived through a particular set of circumstances, who understands a context from the inside, has access to a kind of knowledge that cannot be acquired from a textbook or a case study. That experiential knowledge is a genuine differentiator when it is applied to a curve that values it. The key question Johnson encourages is: what do I know or can I do that very few others in the space I am entering can claim? The answer to that question is the basis of your competitive position on the new curve.