Career Advice: Don't Try To Be The Best

The strawberries taste like strawberries. The snozberries taste like snozberries. Snozzberries? What the heck of a snozzberry? We are the music makers, and we are the dream of such new laws.

This is the Music Makers podcast where I read things out loud to you and then offer my unqualified opinions on them. Career Advice by Scott Last night, I met a script supervisor. She works with directors to make sure a movie has the right continuity and one scene fits the next. It's a fascinating job, hobnobbing with top directors, writers, and celebrities. No two assignments are the same.

How do you get into that kind of career? She earned a degree in anthropology and just, quote, fell into it through a series of events. I know the feeling. I majored in economics, got an MBA, worked at a bank, then a phone company, and then became a cartoonist. For every person who studies something specific, such as law or medicine, and actually ended up in that sort of career, I think there are 5 who let chance pick their careers.

That works out more often than you'd think, but you can't recommend it as a career strategy. Instead, I recommend a general formula for success. Allow me to explain. If you want an average successful life, it doesn't take much planning. Just stay out of trouble, go to school, and apply for jobs you might like.

But if you want something extraordinary, you have 2 paths. 1, become the best at one specific thing, or 2, become very good, top 25%, at 2 or more things. The first strategy is difficult to the point of near impossibility. Few people will ever play in the NBA or make a platinum album. I don't recommend anyone even try.

The second strategy is fairly easy. Everyone has at least a few areas in which they could be top 25% with some effort. In my case, I can draw better than most people, but I'm hardly an artist. I'm not any funnier than the average stand up comedian who never makes it big, but I'm funnier than most people. The magic is that few people can draw well and write jokes.

It's the combination of the 2 that makes what I do so rare. And when you add in my business background, suddenly I had a topic that few cartoonists could hope to understand without living it. I always advise young people to become good public speakers, top 25%. Anyone can do it with practice. If you add that talent to any other, suddenly you're the boss of the people who only have one skill.

Or get a degree in business on top of your engineering degree, law degree, medical degree, science degree, or whatever. Suddenly, you're in charge, or maybe you're starting your own company using your combined knowledge. Capitalism rewards things that are both rare and valuable. You make yourself rare by combining 2 or more pretty goods until no one else has your mix. I didn't spend much time with the script supervisor, but it was obvious that her verbal and writing skills were in the top tier as well as her people skills.

I'm guessing she also has a high attention to detail and perhaps a few other skills in the mix. Probably none of those skills are the best in the world, but together they make a strong package. Apparently, she's been in high demand for decades. At least one of your skills in your mixture should involve communication, either written or verbal, and it could be as simple as learning how to sell more effectively than 75% of the world. That's 1.

Now add to that whatever your passion is, and you have 2, because that's the thing you'll easily put enough energy in to reach the top 25%. If you have an aptitude for a 3rd skill, perhaps business or public speaking, develop that too. It sounds like generic advice, but you'd be hard pressed to find any successful person who didn't have about 3 skills in the top 25%. What are your 3? In case you didn't pick up on it, Scott Adams is the cartoonist behind the comic strip Dilbert.

And over on his blog, he's got tons of great articles like this, but this is this is one of my favorites because I find I find myself identifying a lot with this concept. Let's jump back to the article. He says, capitalism rewards things that are both rare and valuable. You make yourself rare by combining 2 or more pretty goods until no one else has your mix. I like to picture the advice in this article as a Venn diagram where all your skills are overlapping and the point right in the middle is what makes you very rare and very valuable.

Back when I was an accountant, I was an accountant. That was one skill. I was pretty good at being an accountant. I also could program, and I was pretty good at programming. So that was another circle in my Venn diagram.

And I was also pretty good at communicating, so that was a third circle. So where I overlapped was being an accountant who could program and communicate pretty well, and that made me kind of an anomaly, not because I was the best accountant in the world and not because I was the best programmer in the world, but because I was an accountant who could program. Because I'm a programmer, I often get asked, should I learn to code? My response is usually, yeah. You should.

But it's rarely, yeah. You should, and you should become a programmer. So I look at those as I look at those as 2 different things. Should I learn to code? Yes.

Should I leave my job and become a programmer? I don't know. Maybe. Probably not though. What would be better, in my opinion, is taking programming and using that as an ancillary skill, kind of making it your your superpower.

If you're a financial analyst, yes. Learn to code. I don't I don't ever think learning to code is going to hurt you. That doesn't necessarily mean go try to get a job as a coder. That could mean stay as a financial analyst and take coding as your super power.

And now you're a financial analyst who codes, and you can build out all your own models or do whatever financial analysts do, but you can use programming to help you get your real job done or your regular job done and become that much more efficient at doing it. There's definitely no need to start over from scratch. I think you're better off layering skills upon skills until you become until you become the one guy that has this particular set of skills. This is from an episode of product people, a podcast by Justin Jackson. He's interviewing a guy called Patrick McKenzie, and listen to what he says about his Venn diagram of skills.

So I was majored in, computer science at college, but I thought, oh, dear. I'm never gonna get a nice safe job at a big mega corp like Microsoft if all I can do is computer programming. So I'll have to do one other thing. My idea was that if you play the Venn diagram game, the intersection of people who can do computer programming and any other one hard thing should be very small. Yeah.

Even if there's like a 1000000 folks graduating from Indian programming schools every year, the intersection of them who can do that other hard thing is kind of small, and they're I will get my knife safe job at Microsoft. And I thought, well, we trade 1,000,000,000 of dollars a year of software with Japan, but most Americans don't speak English, and most Japanese people well, sorry. Wrong way. Most Japanese people don't speak English. And so if I became the one computer programming Japanese person who graduated in America in the year 2004, that I would have a nice safe job at, I had it picked out.

I was going to be the product manager for the Japanese version of MS Excel. That's like my end career goal. Interesting. And, so I graduated university with a degree in computer science and a degree in East Asian studies, which is basically a way to say Japanese minds, Japanese literature.

See, Patrick thought, I'm a pretty good programmer, but there are lots of pretty good programmers. What if I learned Japanese? Then I would be an American pretty good programmer who also speaks Japanese. So his Venn diagram of skills becomes pretty specific at that point. I can hear you saying it now.

Stop talking about programming. Okay. So what are some other examples that are not programming related? Well, we've already gone over Scott Adams and why he's qualified to write Dilbert because he's kinda funny. He can kinda draw, and he spends some time in business.

So that makes him uniquely qualified to draw Dilbert. Another one, John Grisham. So John Grisham, obviously, is the guy that wrote The Firm and all those other legal thrillers, of which there are many. He is actually a lawyer. He's also a pretty good storyteller, and he's a pretty good writer.

So that makes him uniquely qualified to write tons of legal thriller books. There are lots of lawyers out there. There are lots of writers out there. There are lots of storytellers out there. But as far as lawyer, writer, storytellers go, there can't be that many.

Another one I thought of is a guy called Sean McCabe. Sean does hand lettering. So it's a lot of that cool artwork where the words are the actual artwork. I'll link I'll link his website in the show notes so you can go check it out. It's pretty impressive.

But there are lots of hand letterers out there, people who do this hand lettering as a profession, lots of artists. Sean is now teaching hand lettering. So he's a pretty good letterer. He's a pretty good teacher, but he's got this third skill where he's a pretty good businessman also. So this course is teaching you how to make a living as a hand letterer.

So that's a pretty unique set of skills, being a pretty good artist, a pretty good teacher, and a pretty good businessman, and he's leveraging that into this course that he's teaching. I'll give you a little cheat code. Teaching is a great skill to layer on top of all your other ones. If you're pretty good at 1 or 2 things and then you can also add being a pretty good teacher, then suddenly you've opened yourself up to teaching that thing you're pretty good at to other people and possibly making a living doing that. But now here's the hard part.

Now you gotta think about your life. What are your specific set of overlapping skills? What are 2 or 3 things that you're pretty good at, and where do those things meet, and what's the value in that to the market? How can you leverage your very unique combination of skills into something that you love doing. You can find the show notes for this episode at musicmakers.fm/12.

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