July 20, 2007
From the desk of Jane Galt:Scott Adams has an interesting post on success:
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 two paths:1. Become the best at one specific thing.
2. Become very good (top 25%) at two 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 in the top 25% with some effort. In my case, I can draw better than most people, but I’m hardly an artist. And I’m not any funnier than the average standup 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 two 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. . . . 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.
At least one of the 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 one. Now add to that whatever your passion is, and you have two, because that’s the thing you’ll easily put enough energy into to reach the top 25%. If you have an aptitude for a third 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 three skills in the top 25%.
What are your three?
Obviously, I'm not an economist. And I don't think that Jonathan Franzen, or even Malcolm Gladwell, are looking over their shoulders, worrying that my deft prose styling might knock them off their perch. As far as I can tell, this is a complete list of all my talents:
1) I read fast
2) I write better than perhaps 90% of my countrymen.
3) I understand a modicum of economics
4) I have lovely handwriting, and know how to write a good thank-you note
5) I can produce dinner for eight with two hour's lead time
6) I can imitate Neil Young and Christian Slater
Yet I have parlayed these limited talents into a blogging/journalistic career lucrative enough to keep the wolf away from the door. Like Scott Adams and the script producer he talks about at the beginning of the post, I did so randomly, by stumbling upon something that very few people were doing at all, much less well, and tricking media companies into paying me for it. If the management consulting firm for which I was supposed to have worked hadn't blown up rather spectacularly in 2001, there would be no blog, or journalism career. Funny how things work out.
Update Sorry, bad taste alert. "Blown up" is the fairly common term for companies that undergo severe financial crises. No lives were lost in the process.
Posted by Jane Galt at July 20, 2007 2:29 PM | TrackBack | Technorati inbound linksI can write, I learn fast, and I have a really good memory. I managed to turn those unremarkable skills into a six figure salary. Not bad for an english major who dropped out after only two years.
Next time you do Bloggingheads will you please do your Neil Young and Christian Slate imitations? Pretty please?
Let's see...
I'm a better pistol shot than most people.
I can carry on conversation at varying levels of sophistication in 4 languages.
I'm good at manual tasks: machine work, woodwork, auto repair.
Now, all I need is a market niche for a woodworking multilingual gunslinger.
Megan,
Six of my friends and I will be over for dinner at say, 6:00pm EDT. Hope that's enough notice.
One other extremely handy talent to have is accurately evaluating the talents of others. That means that, no matter what your main talent is, you can not only do it but you can also recruit others to do it with you and then help them grow in their careers. It's not a hard skill to develop, but an amazing number of otherwise talented people have no patience for it whatsoever. A programmer who can program well is valuable. A programmer who can program well, recruit well, and mentor is about twice as valuable, and can easily find themselves compensated that way.
But overall I agree. Three skills at 75th percentile or two at 90th percentile are more than enough for solid success in a society like the U.S.
Dave is on the right track. 1. How meta-rational are you?, and 2. How well do you build social alliances?
Those are the first questions to ask. Your four and five hint at my #2 but there is no reason not to put this on the table more explicitly.
I also marvel at your conception of the 91st percentile when it comes to writing, but we can write that off as false modesty.
The trick isn't acquiring top 25% skills in two areas. It is acquiring top 25% skills in two areas that combine well together. I am a good lawyer and a good gardener. Unless there is a big niche market for gardening law out there that I missed, this doesn't help me.
I can vouch for the Christian Slater impression. Her impression of one of his partners in an old SNL skit is even better.
(Is no one else a big "Pump up the Volume" fan? I never see that movie mentioned as a teenage touchstone, though it was far superior to the Brat Pack fluff so beloved of teens our age.)
You also need to make sure that you have no defects that subtract from your abilities.
I have known some brilliant, multi-talented, and highly lucid individuals who had such severe character/emotional/psychological flaws that they would have been completely non-functional in society had they been less gifted. They nonetheless performed far below the level that one would have expected based on their abilities.
A.S., any good lawyer must be also good at several discrete skills (attention to detail? Client relations? Ability to absorb material quickly? Organization? Written and/or oral communication?) Unpack them, and you might find that they combine well with other things - perhaps even gardening!
damn sparky! I suck at selling myself as a commodity, am I thwarted? :D probably will just have to get used to being middling happy and making my children laugh. That's what I get for being a Strong Type B...
on the other claw... OK, I'll be the wet blanket.
...depends how you define success.
I know some extremely successful gradeshcool teachers... who are still paying student loans as they contemplate retirement. That was of course because they bought in to the idea that they would need advanced degrees, while ignoring the fact they would never be paid for that...
D
You are also one of the most intelligent writers in the public sphere.
One of the things that has served me well is that I am very verbal. People think I'm a lot smarter than I really am simply because I speak up quickly about whatever the topic of conversation is.
Of course this doesn't really work if you are a complete idiot. But I've found just the opposite holds a lot of people back. Specifically, I've known very intelligent people who were 'steathily' intelligent. For the longest time, the rest of us had no idea how smart they really were because they were shy, or slow to speak up, or however you want to phrase it.
Am I making sense here? Obviously I'm not a natural writer. Megan, help me out here.
Mike
One of the things that has served me well is that I am very verbal. People think I'm a lot smarter than I really am simply because I speak up quickly about whatever the topic of conversation is.
Of course this doesn't really work if you are a complete idiot. But I've found just the opposite holds a lot of people back. Specifically, I've known very intelligent people who were 'steathily' intelligent. For the longest time, the rest of us had no idea how smart they really were because they were shy, or slow to speak up, or however you want to phrase it.
Am I making sense here? Obviously I'm not a natural writer. Megan, help me out here.
Mike
Megan,
You write better than 99.9% of the population, and I am certainly being generous to everyone else.
Seriously, this is true. I read a lot from lots of people, and bad writing is the norm.
Actually, a modest perusal of the slush pile at any publishing organization will disabuse you of the notion that Megan is exaggerating her writing skills. 90% of written material submitted is attrocious. Producing readable material consistently puts you clearly in the top ten percent, no questions asked.
Above that 90% line, the question rapidly becomes one of suitability for a particular venue, and other matters of style and taste. Yes, there are clear levels above that, but top ten percent is pretty easy to spot.
Obviously, she's one of
But as a general blogger, she's just damn good, not *crazy* damn good.
Oh, fretz.
It read a less than sign as a html command.
That third paragraph should have read,
"Obviously, she's one of less than 30 people at her organization, hired out of 300 million people, so that puts her at least the 99.9999 percent best at writing what her organization needs/wants written..."
1) I read fast
2) I write better than perhaps 90% of my countrymen.
3) I understand a modicum of economics.
Those three will indeed do it.
Hmmm...let's see...
-I am an incredible smart ass.
-I can cure hiccups.
-I make the world's best baked beans.
I have to say there is NOT a market for any of those skills.
However, I can count to 23, which surprisingly very few people can do, and have ended up doing something that less than 2 dozen people in the country do and get paid incredibly well for doing it.
meh. I guess it all evens out...
Reagan Fan: There is at least one market for being a smartass - comedy. Unfortunately, you have to be an incredibly funny smartass to beat the plentiful competition. It also seems to correlate to Hollywood stardom, but the cause-effect relationship there may be the other way around...
Do you mean you imitate Neil Young singing or speaking? Just curious. I'm imagining the former, but the latter would be kind of funny/strange/rare.
As for my skills, I write well, I read very quickly, I tested quite high on the logic portion of the GRE, I can make a wide variety of people laugh. Basically, my skills (aside from that last one) kind of scream that I should be a lawyer, but I never went to law school. At 33, maybe it's not too late to do it, but it certainly feels too late. And there's the fact that I've met one or two truly happy lawyers in my life (and many, many unhappy ones).
What worked well for me in my career was to look for intersections. A.S. kind of hit on that. But, there were many cases where a lot of people knew subject A and a lot of people knew B, but virtually no one could put them together. An example is database and engineering data. Few people could design an engineering data base.
Rick
Of course, you also have the problem of being good at stuff you really don't want to do for any length of time.
I found out a long time ago that I'm a great salesman - people tended to walk out of stores with about 50% more stuff when I got hold of them. But I really, really don't like doing it because of the dishonesty involved in being a "great" salesman.
Ditto for the military. I did my four years, and found that I didn't like the regimentation - but I was very good at it (technology and organization), and was getting all sorts of cash bonus offers from the USAF to stay in and do "interesting" work.
So now I'm in a field that requires multiple fields of expertise, and doing jobs that change every day (sometimes every hour... like this past weekend, when I found myself on a 21 foot scaffold tower in a driving rainstorm, putting weather covers on video projectors for a concert that HAD to happen).
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