Your unique combination
Almost nobody is the best in the world at one thing. Everyone can be the best combination of three things.
The best-in-the-world path is available to roughly no one. For any given skill, there are thousands of people better than you. You'll spend your life chasing them.
But the best combination of three skills? That's a niche nobody else is filling.
The Scott Adams frame
Scott Adams wrote about this. He's not the funniest cartoonist. Not the best writer. Not the smartest business thinker. But he's the best combination of those three, which carved out a path nobody else was on.
The insight: the difficulty of being top 1% in three things you care about is much lower than being top 0.01% in one. And the combination is more defensible because it's rarer.
How to find your combination
Three questions:
- What skills have you genuinely invested in for years?
- Which ones do you keep coming back to even when nobody's paying you?
- Where do they intersect, what could only you produce given that combination?
The answer to #3 is your career, if you're willing to see it. Most people aren't, because the combination feels less prestigious than any single top-tier skill would. The combination also happens to be more durable.