The Master Locksmith

You are drawn to problems the way other people are drawn to parties. Give you a hard, tangled question and a closed door, and you are content for hours — reading, testing, discarding, rebuilding. Your standards are ferocious and mostly aimed at yourself, though colleagues learn quickly that 'fine' from you is a compliment. You don't perform certainty; you earn it, and you'll dismantle a popular idea in one sentence if it doesn't hold. That independence is your superpower and your tax: you'd rather redo something alone than explain it twice, so you accumulate work — and rarely accumulate help. People can read your skepticism as coldness when it's actually respect: you argue with ideas you take seriously. When you let someone watch you work, apprentice-style, you discover collaboration doesn't have to mean compromise — and your best solutions finally outlive you.