Skill stacking
The strategy of becoming uniquely valuable not by being world-class at one thing, but by combining several merely-above-average skills into a combination almost no one else has. The smaller the field of people who can match your full stack, the less competition you face — and the more you start producing what looks from the outside like destiny luck.
The Scott Adams archetype
Scott Adams (creator of Dilbert) is the canonical case in the source video: he was never the best at any single skill — drawing, writing, comedy, business — but he was nearly the only person combining all four in one place. Dilbert was the result. Robert Greene’s Mastery makes the same point at book length: “the future belongs to those who learn more skills and combine them in creative ways.”
Tim Ferriss’s project-selection heuristic
The host of Naval Ravikant - How to Get Rich Without Luck (video) credits Tim Ferriss with a related decision rule for picking what to work on:
Is there a way that I can win doing this even if I fail? And the way that I win doing something even if I fail is if I develop skills and relationships that transcend that project as a failure.
If yes, the downside is bounded. The skills/relationships fold into the next stack regardless of how this particular project lands.
Don’t pre-judge relevance
Two supporting heuristics from the source:
- Steve Jobs: “You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards.” Don’t refuse to learn a skill because you can’t yet see how it’ll be useful.
- Genuine interest beats forced relevance. When you’re actually interested, you’ll go deeper than people who are dutifully studying it — and depth in an unusual skill is what makes the eventual combination unique. (Naval Ravikant: this is also the route to Kind 4 luck — character/reputation.)
Quotes
Judge a man by his questions rather than his answers. — Voltaire (cited by Tim Ferriss when explaining why he chose to start a podcast — interviewing was a transferable skill regardless of podcast outcome)
Related
- Four kinds of luck — skill stacking is the operational route to Kind 4
- Naval Ravikant — frames depth-via-genuine-interest as the underlying engine