Map your three circles honestly

Separately answer each circle — passion, best-at, economic engine — before looking for the intersection.

Why it works

Conflating the three circles produces distortion: passion inflates perceived competence ("I love it so I must be good at it"), and economic necessity narrows vision before genuine capability is assessed. Mapping each circle independently, then looking for the overlap, keeps the analysis honest. The intersection is the strategic insight; reaching it prematurely forfeits its value.

How to do it

1. Circle 1 — Passion: List the activities where time disappears, where you return energized rather than depleted. These are not aspirations — they are observed patterns in your actual behavior.
2. Circle 2 — Best-at: What can you, or could you develop the capacity to, do at a genuinely high level — not just "good," but where you have or could develop real advantage? Get outside input; self-assessment here is unreliable.
3. Circle 3 — Economic engine: What creates sustainable value — for employers, clients, or markets — in a way that can support your life? Be concrete, not aspirational.
4. Draw the circles and identify only what is genuinely common to all three. Treat partial overlaps as candidates, not conclusions.

Evidence

Collins’s Good to Great research identified the Hedgehog Concept through systematic comparison of great vs. merely good companies over 15 years. The research is organizational; individual application is an extrapolation with face validity but without dedicated empirical testing. (observational)

Good to Great methodology has been critiqued (Rosenzweig’s "halo effect" critique) for potential hindsight bias in identifying which factors caused greatness. Individual application adds another layer of extrapolation.

Sources

• Collins (2001), Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap and Others Don’t

Common mistake

Filling in the circles with aspirations ("I want to be passionate about X") rather than observed current reality — the circles describe what is true now, not what would be nice.