Strategic Skill-Building: Create Rare and Valuable Skill Combinations
In Tim Ferriss’s book, Tools of Titans, Scott Adams, best-selling author and creator of the Dilbert comic strip, talks about using strategic skill-building (what he refers to as diversification) to create a rare and valuable combination of skills.
Adams said that if you want an average career and life, it doesn’t take much strategy. But, if you want an extraordinary career and life, you have two options.
He says that you can either:
1. “become the best at one specific thing” (the hardest)
or
2. “become top 25% at two or more things.”
Adams says that being better than most at two or more things makes what you do more rare - which often means more valuable.
He goes on to say “capitalism rewards things that are both rare and valuable. You make yourself rare by combining two or more ‘pretty goods’ until no one else has your mix.”
Cal Newport, best-selling author and MIT-trained computer science professor at Georgetown University, in his book So Good They Can’t Ignore You, refers to this rare and valuable skill-building as career capital.
He argues that “the traits that make a great job great are rare and valuable, and therefore, if you want a great job, you need to build up rare and valuable skills (career capital) to offer in return.”
Newport and Adams both agree that you need to become more than average at these chosen skills to make them “rare and valuable”.
Adams says to shoot for being top 25% at your chosen combination of skills.
Newport says to focus on having what he refers to as a “craftsman mindset”, which he defines as having a relentless focus on getting really good at, and striving for the highest quality of, what you are trying to produce.
Two different versions of applying this strategy
Adams used strategic and diversified skill-building to become what he jokingly refers to as “a rich and famous cartoonist who can’t draw well.”
In his book How to fail at everything and still win big…, he explained that as an aspiring cartoonist, he realized that he had something that others in the same arena didn’t have: years of corporate business experience and an MBA.
In addition, he began to strategically acquire and use other skills learned while still in his corporate job - internet marketing, sales promotion, contract negotiation, business plan development, project management, business writing, and public speaking.
By using this strategic diversification strategy, Adams was able to build a unique (rare) combination of skills that helped him become “a powerful market force” and create Dilbert, one of the most popular and widely distributed comic strips.
He then channeled this success into becoming the author of multiple best-selling books.
Newport used a slightly different approach to gain what he considered to be rare and valuable skills in his world of academics.
For example, he decided to apply the concept/strategy of “deliberate practice” to a strategically chosen effort in order to challenge his ability to concentrate without distraction, understand at a deeper level, and then to document/share his insights in the right places.
Specifically, he chose to dig into extremely challenging research proofs. This deeper understanding allowed him to set himself apart from others in his field. He was then able to apply what he had learned toward publishing at a top conference in his field.
Additionally, during his process of digging deeper into this well-cited proof, he found a couple of errors which allowed him to connect with, and gain respect from, the original authors.
Deliberate Practice
Deliberate practice is a method described slightly differently depending on the context; however, Newport describes it as “a method for building skills by ruthlessly stretching yourself beyond where you’re comfortable.”
This approach can be applied to almost any situation in which you wish to gain rare and valuable skills.
