
Skill Stacking: How to Achieve Success Whilst Being Average - shsachdev
https://www.careerfair.io/reviews/skill-stack-for-tech-career
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osapy
Be lucky

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AlchemistCamp
Marc Andreesen wrote about this same idea on his blog in back in 2007.

It was written just as well as this piece and given his success pioneering web
browsers and building 3 separate billion dollar businesses in tech, it should
be a good fit for HN:
[https://pmarchive.com/guide_to_career_planning_part2.html](https://pmarchive.com/guide_to_career_planning_part2.html)

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dorkwood
"Roughly speaking, you should identify what type of outcome you want and then
work backwards to identify what skills you might need to get there."

I've tried this logical approach. It tends to make me miserable, since I lack
the intrinsic motivation to follow through with my plan and then end up angry
at myself for not having enough perseverance, or discipline, or whatever. Or
even better: half way through my plan I realize that I don't even like the
path I'm headed down, and that I only chose it based on a surface
understanding of the field (like a child who thinks they want to be a doctor,
but has no idea what that actually entails).

Something I've found that works for me is to just work on whatever I find
interesting at the time. If you're a curious person, then what you find
interesting will change from year to year. And since interests are generally
not completely random, and tend to branch off from current interests, then
over a period of a few years you'll find that you've automatically developed a
set of complementary skills. And the best part is: you didn't have to plan
anything, and you enjoyed what you were doing the whole time.

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yelloweyes
Being a better illustrator than most is not really an easy task. And the guy
from Dilbert is not really a better illustrator than most. I mean, he draws
some very basic shit.

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happytoexplain
The author makes the mistake of ambiguity. Colloquially, "a better x than
most" implicitly means "a better x than most x", which Scott Adams is probably
not for x = illustrator, but the author means "a better illustrator than most
_people_ " (I think), which Scott Adams certainly is.

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martindbp
I think this is more applicable to being an entrepreneur or manager rather
than individual contributor. In my experience, most companies reward hyper-
specialization.

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jjeaff
And yet they tend to reward the managers of those hyper-specialized employees
even more.

