Skill stacking

Dear new developer,

I found this post, “How to Become the Best in the World at Something”, enlightening. The author is arguing that if you pick one area to be the best in, you’re going to have to be very very good at it. For example, if I wanted to be the best in the world at building websites with Rails, I’d have to work very very hard at it.

If you, on the other hand, pick a few things to be excellent at, you will have an easier time being the best in the world who can do all those things well. For example, if I were to be the world at building websites with Rails for CSA farms in the USA with ecommerce and email functionality, I’d have to understand and be good at:

• building websites with Rails
• knowing the needs of CSA farms
• understanding ecommerce
• knowing email strategies

I’d need to know a lot about all of these, but I wouldn’t need to be world class in all of them to be world class in the overlap between them. The post has some nice graphs illustrating this.

Here’s a great quote from the post:

Let’s run some numbers on this. If your city has a million people, for example, and you belong to the top 10% of six skills, that’s 1,000,000 x 10% x 10% x 10% x 10% x 10% x 10% = 1. You’re the number one person in your city with those six skills. Bump that number up to 10 skills? Boom, you’re the best in the world at that combination of 10 skills.

This is another way of saying what a lot of business advice says: nicheing down is an effective business strategy. By nicheing down, you are decreasing the number of people that you are competing with and also making it easier to market yourself to people who need you. It’s a lot easier to focus on CSA farms who need ecommerce websites with email and to gain excellence in understanding their problems and potential solutions than it is to gain excellence in all things Rails. (I wrote about this a bit in deep vs wide experience.)

The whole post is worth a read.

Sincerely,

Dan