Thinking tool: Be Pareto-best in the world
Being the best in the world at something can make you very valuable! And if other people know that you're the best, then you will be the person they come to.
It might sound hard to be literally the best in the world at something. But it turns out that actually there are such a wide range of dimensions of skills that being the best at some intersection of skills is surprisingly not that hard.
John Wentworth puts this well in Being the (Pareto) Best in the World:
There are many table tennis players, but only one best player in the world. This is a side effect of ranking people on one dimension: there’s only going to be one point furthest to the right (absent a tie).
Pareto optimality pushes us into more dimensions. There’s only one best table tennis player, and only one best 100-meter sprinter, but there can be an unlimited number of Pareto-optimal table tennis/sprinters. [...]
Claiming a spot on a Pareto frontier gives you some chunk of the skill-space to call your own. But that’s only useful to the extent that your territory contains useful problems.
Two pieces factor in here. First, how large a territory can you claim? This is about elbow room, as in the diagram above. Second, what’s the density of useful problems within this region of skill-space? The table tennis/sprinting space doesn’t have a whole lot going on. Statistics and gerontology sounds more promising. Cryptography and monetary economics is probably a particularly rich Pareto frontier these days. (And of course, we don’t need to stop at two dimensions - but we’re going to stop there in this post in order to keep things simple.)
Scott Adams, creator of the Dilbert cartoon, describes his success this way:
I'm a poor artist, certainly in the beginning. I've kind of brute forced myself up to mediocre.
I've never taken a writing class, but I can write. I'm okay. You put me in a room of writers, I'm not going to be the best one.
If I have a party at my house, I'm not the funniest person in the room, but I'm a little bit funny. [...]
Add on top of that that I have an MBA and business experience. All of that works in.
So, I've got a bunch of fairly average talents that only the sum of them makes them valuable. And I think almost anybody could follow that formula.
Of course if you want opportunities, you also have to pick an intersection that other people care about, usually with skills that work well together. Being an excellent dentist and an excellent maritime lawyer are both useful individually, but nobody needs both at once.
To figure out where to become the best, you might consider backwards chaining from the problems you want to be able to work on. Building generally useful skills (such as written and verbal communication, critical thinking, project management, becoming high agency), or taking bets on building lots of skills can create surface area for luck.
Some high-demand intersections can be crowded. For example, the intersection of maths skill and programming skill is quite busy. But again, you can add a few more dimensions and get to a unique point.
Related concepts
This is part of my thinking tools series. Also consider:
- Create surface area for luck: doing lots of things is how you accumulate an unusual intersection in the first place
- Backchaining: start from the problems you want to be able to work on, and derive the intersection from them
- Hunt for 100x opportunities: a Pareto spot is only valuable if useful problems live in it