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How to Become the Best in the World at Something

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Re: How to Become the Best in the World at Something

#31

Post by adrianmonk »

nostrademons wrote: post #19
crdrost wrote: post #2

One nice thing to share here is that a statistical model for success under such conditions is for there to be a collection of independent random variables that multiply to form your overall success: people who lack any particular one of them, x_1 and x_2 = 1000 but x_3 = 0, see the product x_1 x_2 x_3 = 0, below people who have x_1 = 10, x_2 = 10, x_3 = 10. Taking a logarithm, one gets a sum of independent identicall…

This changes with the size of the firm you're part of. It's true for individual pursuits like basketball, drawing comics, or entrepreneurship. But a big corporation gets around a lack of any one critical variable by hiring someone for that variable. So if you're an excellent backend engineer, your time is wasted learning digital art, because somebody else will be making the artwork . Effectively the corporation becom…

> So if you're an excellent backend engineer, your time is wasted learning digital art, because somebody else will be making the artwork.

Tangentially, as a backend engineer, I've had to tell the people who made the digital art that the additional icon they supplied me wasn't quite the same color as the existing ones it was supposed to match and also looked misaligned because it didn't follow the same geometrical conventions.

So I wish what you're saying were true, but it isn't necessarily. This being a tangent, I'm not necessarily looking for a moral to the story here, but maybe it's something about having a certain minimum competence in an area so you can be sure you're working effectively with others.

(EDIT: What is a backend engineer doing with an icon at all? Sticking the URL where it's hosted into a config file and modifying the logic so that it shows up (or doesn't) as appropriate, then testing that by looking at the UI and seeing art that looks wrong.)

Re: How to Become the Best in the World at Something

#32

Post by joecot »

agota wrote: post #25
joecot wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The issue is that its common for there to be very low demand for such an overlap of skill sets. Also, how would you leverage such an overlap? The only overlap they really gave in the examples was "They're good at X skill.... and marketing themselves." Literally, the example people were good at both a skill and then marketing themselves as being good at that skill. Gary Vaynerchuk is both a good writer and good at m…

I think that's a great observation. One exception I can think of where you legitimately need to be decent at three skills is bootstrapping as a solopreneur. You need to be able to code, design, and market your product. Other than that, it does seem like "X + marketing" is what you need, though I guess "marketing" is an umbrella term (content marketing requires writing ability, public speaking requires public speaking…

Sure, and I'm sure there are actual cases where being good at 2 different skills (not one of which being some form of marketing yourself) is relevant. Devops pretty much requires being good at both development and server administration. You're correct that bootstrapping requires multiple different skills, including some amount of business sense. There are many cases where having multiple different skills could make you the best in the world at that combo. But those correlations aren't random -- so lots of different people will be trying to be the best at the same set of skills as you, since they're connected as requirements -- and despite the article's premise, that's not the case the author's examples make.

The article really just makes it clear it's important to be able to market yourself. However "people able to market their skills achieve more than people who can't" is not as interesting an article premise as "How to Become the Best in the World at Something (by being good at multiple skills)". And the author went with the latter because, well, it's important to be able to market yourself well.

Re: How to Become the Best in the World at Something

#33

Post by ptd »

derekp7 wrote: post #6
hanniabu wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some people are actually legit naturals though. There was this one kid I knew that didn't play sports growing up, but if you gave him a basketball in gym class you could nail every 3 pointer. He was asked to come out to compete in an important track meet because he was known to be fast and he ran a 400m hurdles race in 53 seconds with the worst possible form. For reference, in the men's World Championships earlier in…

You also have the case where natural ability is a hindrance. If the kid is used to not having to work at a particular sport, they will have trouble when they get to a point that they have to involve deliberate practice in order to get beyond their current level (something they never had to do before).

This applies to academics as well. A lot of people have stories of being the best in their class/school at something, but when they get to college they are average, or even below average because they never had to deliberately study.

Re: How to Become the Best in the World at Something

#34

Post by mrcoder111 »

This is really incorrect advice in the world of software engineering. At least in FAANG companies and big name startups, no one cares if you read How to Win Friends and Influence people and have "social skills". If you can't pass the engineering interviews, you're fucked.

Re: How to Become the Best in the World at Something

#37

Post by agota »

Ididntdothis wrote: post #11
hanniabu wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some people are actually legit naturals though. There was this one kid I knew that didn't play sports growing up, but if you gave him a basketball in gym class you could nail every 3 pointer. He was asked to come out to compete in an important track meet because he was known to be fast and he ran a 400m hurdles race in 53 seconds with the worst possible form. For reference, in the men's World Championships earlier in…

At my boxing gym every few months some kid would show up and after a week he would be much better than everybody else. These guys just understood the sport immediately and also had physical ability. A lot of these guys dropped out but if this level of talent meets with interest and work ethic then you get super athletes like Michael Jordan or Michael Schumacher in F1. My ex coach knew sugar ray Leonard pretty well in…

That's why I think that trying to be the best in the world at something almost certainly means setting yourself up for failure.

At the top, you have genetic freaks with insane work ethic that are obsessed with that particular skill. Can you compete with that? No.

I'd guess that if you have average talent, you can probably get to the top 10%, mainly through outworking everyone else. But you will never be the best in the world.

Re: How to Become the Best in the World at Something

#38

Post by gpapilion »

mrcoder111 wrote: post #34

This is really incorrect advice in the world of software engineering. At least in FAANG companies and big name startups, no one cares if you read How to Win Friends and Influence people and have "social skills". If you can't pass the engineering interviews, you're fucked.

This is only true to a point. You have to be in the better half of the technical skill set, but in the higher levels of technical roles leadership skills are stressed more than technical skills.

Senior and staff roles stress proposing/completing large projects and working with others to get it done. Its hard to move to these levels without the skills that enable you to work with others.

Re: How to Become the Best in the World at Something

#39

Post by wainstead »

swader999 wrote: post #4

Sport is going this way. There's a growing body of evidence that early specialization produces less champions. Kids are encouraged to participate in other sports well into their teen years. Less burn out, lower injuries and this approach creates more athletes that can be described as "naturals". They have skills and abilities that seem magical and unexpected.

> There's a growing body of evidence that early specialization produces less champions. Kids are encouraged to participate in other sports well into their teen years.

This is the subject matter of the book "Range":

https://www.amazon.com/Range-Generalists-Triumph-Specialized...

Re: How to Become the Best in the World at Something

#40

Post by agota »

markus_zhang wrote: post #18

Although I agree with the idea, getting good at a jack of trades might be equally difficult (e.g. depending on childhood influences or genetics). If A complements B and someone gets good at A, he/she probably HATES B to the point to avoid it as much as possible.

Another person in this thread pointed out that "skill stacking" boils down to becoming good at two skills, "X + marketing".

I think that's a good example of "Good at A + hates B", say "Good at software engineering + hates marketing".

But what are the other "Good at A + hates B" skill combinations?

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