It’s easy to overlook the profoundness of the Peyton Manning Question. You might think it’s just a matter of knowing what you’re good at doing. Or what you’re talented at doing. Or what you’re extremely, unbelievably, and incredibly great at doing (with Manning, I think this is a little closer to the target).

Here’s what I embed in the PMQ. I urge you to consider doing the same.

Five things:

1. What am I exceptional at doing? I have few rivals at it. The answer comes from myself and also from the input of other people.

2. What am I willing to devote hours, days, weeks to practicing at, in order to become even better on a constant basis? This is the question that separates PMQ from the more mundane stuff of “what am I good at?”

3. What can I immediately do when called upon with no notice or in a crisis, high-pressure situation?

4. What will I continue to return to in seeking relentless excellence. By this I mean that I’m never fully satisfied and never, never, never, never complacent.

5. When was the last time that I challenged myself on how I did this thing, that I and I alone looked in the mirror and said you can do better.

These are the five smaller yet vital sub-questions that, for me, comprise PMQ.

By the way, my answer had two stages over time. One was my internal knowledge that I had always loved history. The other was my external quest to test and probe how a broader group of people–I’ll label it the market–would respond to me.