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The article to me seems to be saying that if you pour your heart and soul into a skill, let's say playing guitar, and after several years despite your best efforts you are still not very good, you probably should not depend on it to support yourself financially. This doesn't preclude you doing it for fun on your own terms.

> Why should you aim to have an unfair advantage over anybody?

Cynical: This makes life easier. Exploiting an unfair advantage over others ensures you don't have to spend a large percentage of your life fighting for the basic elements of survival. It's selfish, but the number of people you are is 1 and not more or less, which also matches the number of people who truly care about your quality of life.

Your mainframe example is bad because those people are still making a lot of money maintaining legacy systems somewhere.

> The article to me seems to be saying that if you pour your heart and soul into a skill, let's say playing guitar, and after several years despite your best efforts you are still not very good, you probably should not depend on it to support yourself financially. This doesn't preclude you doing it for fun on your own terms.

This is a perfectly sensible point, but it's basically a trivial bit of insight. Indeed, if you can't make a decent living from something then you have to find something different to do. It seemed to me that the article made the point that you should hyper-specialize on the thing that you're 'best' at (from an economic perspective, I guess).

Incidentally I think that if you like smth enough to stick with it for a few years then you'll end up being pretty good at it (although, if the thing itself is not lucrative, you may not be able to make a living from it).

I would oppose even stronger against "unfair advantage", author in the article wrote "almost unfair". If you worked harder than others to achieve some level of understanding or mastery it is not something I would ever call "unfair advantage".

The "unfair" part is that people have different personality traits and thus enjoy different things. Working hard to become great at something you enjoy is relatively easier than working hard to become great at something you hate.

For example, my programming skills are a result of time and effort I spent learning programming, and the fact that even in my free time I learned new things and worked on my personal projects. Thus I "deserve" to be better than someone who doesn't care, doesn't learn, and doesn't practice.

But the "undeserved" part is that enjoy exploring technical details and working alone; those are traits I was born with. If a person without these traits would try to spend the same time and effort doing the same things, it would be much harder for them, because they would suffer along the way, and they wouldn't get the emotional rewards along the way that I did. In that sense I have an advantage, because the same amount of hard work is less of a sacrifice for me.

The opposite situation for me is social skills. I also spent a lot of work here, read various books, and practiced various techniques. First, the results are mediocre, simply because unless I force myself, I ignore many opportunities to practice. (Because, unlike with programming, this practice is not intrinsically pleasant to me.) Second, sometimes I focus and do a good job, but from inside it feels like hard work, even if from outside it seems "natural". I can seem like I enjoy it, but it actually makes me very tired and I need a break afterwards. This whole coronavirus situation feels like a wonderful vacation to me. The only way to excel in this area would be to torture myself (just like other people need to torture themselves to solve a simple math problem).

So it makes sense, when you choose your career, to consider not just how well it pays and how much work is needed, but also how much suffering that work brings to you. If you are lucky, there is a profitable career where you have the unfair advantage that the same amount of work causes you less suffering than to your potential competitors. So you can work harder than them and still have more enjoyable life.

For me this is something that has more of an application in buisness than in life in general.

A good example is I recently started doing Affiliate Marketing. Specifically I market webhosting products. I chose to do Affiliate Marketing and write about webhosting specifically because I already had a bunch of the core competencies.

The way I think about it, to start an Affiliate Marketing site (at this point I'm using it purely as an example), I have to have several competencies including:

- Knowledge of my Niche - Web development skills - Writing skills - Marketing / SEO

While I am was not the best writer and knew little about SEO. I also knew I had a significant advantage over my competition because I already had a very good understanding of how to run a website and when learning SEO things came much easier because I could connect the technical dots that much faster.

I would characterize my decision to start this business is based largely in the fact that a good chunk of the skills required were already in my circle of competence. So I would never want to base my entire life on this theory, it works well when you are trying to work on something new and maximize your chance of success.

Yes, if you only focus on your one skill which you already have a high degree of competence in, you have a very low probablility to succeed; you would have to become the very top person in the world on that specific thing to actually succeed. Instead, you should probably try to combine your existing skill with other skills which complement the existing skill very well, as well as some other unusual but useful skills. That way, you have a large change of having a unique set of skills, which you can combine in ways which nobody else can do; this is highly probable to succeed, since you are then highly likely to be useful to many people.

This concept is usually called having a “Talent stack”; described, for instance, here:

https://www.stedavies.com/talent-stack/

You seem to be incorrectly applying this article as advice on self development and then making an argument against that.

The author isn't suggesting that this is the way to achieve true happiness. They are suggesting that this is a good strategy to become the best at something, regardless of why you want to be the best at it (financial benefit, personal fulfillment, etc.).

> More so, what happens if industry trends shift and it turns out you specialized on the 'wrong' thing

What's the alternative to this? Remain mediocre at a number of skills just in case one of them go out of style? If you want to be the best at something, specialize in that thing but keep a pulse on the direction the field is moving and adapt as needed. The world's best mainframe developer probably won't immediately be the world's best PC developer upon switching, but they will be far from starting from square one.

That last line depends. There's a lot more to the environment, team, management structure, business goals, financing, and much more that would place them effectively at square one.

I agree with your other points. But as an example, I worked previously with some 20+ year executives with huge products... 15 years before the market I was working with them in. So, it's great they knew a lot about launching product in 2005. But I need expertise for 2020. If their ideas cost more than a more modern, more efficient method, I don't need to have to teach them the method uphill against their stubbornness to stick to what they know. This issue played a role in me releasing an entire sales team two months into my role. I don't care that they had the most experienced people. The debate about what they knew and where the company was going was driving up costs and lowering productivity for other teams.

> You seem to be incorrectly applying this article as advice on self development and then making an argument against that.

From the article:

> In our personal lives, it would help to focus on being that person in the community who could be depended on for a particular task/skillset required for a task. [...] Focussing will ensure that you are not distracted and the increases likelihood of you doing a good job.

I think the whole article is supposed to be more general life advice, not just career advice.

> They are suggesting that this is a good strategy to become the best at something

If this is the case then the advice is absolutely trivial. More so, it doesn't address the question of what it means to be the 'best' at something.

Yes, it's life advice, but no assertion is made that this advice should be applied by everyone. It's more "If you want to do X, here is some advice" not "You should do X".

I don't think it's possible to define "best" for everything. Being the best tennis player and being the best cook involve optimizing for two completely different objectives. What's more, you can define what best means to you and work towards that. The author's opinion on what best means is irrelevant IMO.

Maybe the advice is trivial, but it provoked me to reflect on how I am using my skills. I am going to keep this in mind as I choose how to spend my time. In hindsight it's obvious, but I still think it's a constructive article.

You need to eat. You want some other things in life that are not needs. You won't get good at something that makes you miserable while learning to do it (not to be confused with getting bored once you are good at it). Work really hard on whatever it is you do well because that leaves you with the money to do other things you enjoy that makes money.

The important part is to choose well. Magnus Carlson makes overa million dollars per year playing chess. I play chess, but it is highly unlikely I will ever make that much. Thus even though study could make me better, I don't study chess hard enough to become best in the world. I enjoy programming computers, and I get paid great for doing that. I could probably make more money than either of the previous if I was going for CEO, but I would hate the job so I let someone else do it (the competition is stiff too, but even if I never make CEO I'd be earning a lot more money in upper management)

The point is to choose what you become good at for money, and study as hard as needed, and then work as hard as needed to make the rest of your life work. In today's world you probably can't work less than 40 hours a week, so you need to choose that 40 hours well (note, chess world champion and CEO wannabes work more than 40 hours a week, one more reason to love it if you are doing it). You can choose to save and retire early if you want. Many people choose not to retire because they love their job, others retire early: both are valid life choices.

There is nothing wrong with switching courses. My dad switched from mainframes to PCs, and then back to mainframes. I know someone who quit programming to sell real estate. When to switch is a hard question because you have to accept that you are not the best for at least a while.

> Why should my life be centered on the 'thing I'm good at'?

I have a conspiracy theory: I wonder if this is the sort of thing the ultra wealthy want the rest of us to believe. That way we are more easily commodified as labor. We can be put into a spreadsheet or Big Data app to make the 99.9% of us more manageable. We are more manageable if we are more predictable.

It's the flip side to "you are not your job" from Fight Club which ultimately must have got it from the general idea of identification, in a spiritual sense.

This is a growing affirmation from all around to tell you do what you are good at, while you are actually just mediocre and trying to figure out what you want to do.

What's life when we don't try new things and live like flowing water. Competence is a sham.

Bingo, they're trying to model their ideal investment targets, not happy people.

> Why should my life be centered on the 'thing I'm good at'? What does that even mean? Is it the thing I like to do and that makes me happy, or the thing that can bring me money?

Those are supposed to be the same thing, insofar as enjoying something lowers the bar to practicing it, and practicing something is—regardless of "talent"—the way to become good-enough at that thing to make money.

How does a professional athlete, or musician, or artist, get their start? Certainly not by looking at the field and thinking "there's money in that!" Instead, they get their start by just being really, really into that thing as a hobby, usually from the time they're young. By the time they're an adult, they're better at it than the average professional in the field, regardless of whether they did sought out any "professional" training. Thus, they can very easily just decide to become a professional at that point. (Or not; nobody's forcing them to! But it's a way to keep doing what they love—so they usually do!)

Personally, I was an 11-year-old kid who really enjoyed learning programming concepts and playing around with compilers/interpreters/etc. Now, because I spent so much time indulging my passion, it's become my circle of competence. And so now it's how I make money.

> Should we all be efficient production machines where our efficiency is dictated by whatever the economic needs of the moment are?

I mean, comparative advantage. Assume for a moment that we're not in a post-work utopia, and some things need to get done by humans rather than robots, despite nobody wanting to do them. Who better to do those things, than the person who can do them "most" efficiently (probably because they practiced, probably because they liked it), and thus waste the fewest man-years of Global Aggregate Human Lifespan in solving that problem?

(Where by "most", I mean some optimum between "more-efficiently than that person can do any other thing they can do", and "more-efficiently than any other person can do that thing." There's a real formal definiton of comparative advantage but it's too finicky to lay out here.)

For your hobbies, do whatever you want. You're not optimizing your hobbies. But in terms of whether you e.g. spend five work hours (that you could have spent on work) doing your own books as a freelancer, vs. handing it those books to a professional accountant who finishes them in one hour, and who then charges you only the amount of money you make in one hour? I think the choice is pretty clear.

You will never be a better accountant than you are a [whatever], so you hire the accountant. If you want to be a better accountant than you are a [whatever]—then, upon achieving that goal, you'll be a person who is an accountant, and now someone who pays for [whatever] instead of paying for accounting!

I find that an interesting take-away from the article.

There are two underlying assumptions in the original author's piece; first that you find value in working and second that you need to work to support yourself. It also equates "less effort" with "easier to do" which implies more success at doing. But the questions posted are useful ones, to wit:

Why should my life be centered on the 'thing I'm good at'?

I'm going to stipulate here that most people split their life into three parts, the part where they work (someone else tells them what to do), the part where they sleep, and the part where they do what they want to do. And that the ratio of those three parts to one week can be called their "work life balance."

If you can agree to that stipulation, then I'm going to add the observation that the balance ratio is a significant, and perhaps dominant, contributor to a person's over all feeling of happiness, restfulness, and well being.

If you agree with that observation, then I'm going to add that the dominant force acting on the balance is the amount of wealth your work generates per unit time.

Basically, if you're paid more you can work fewer hours while still meeting all of your financial obligations. Further, you can reduce the portion of your life dedicated to work and distribute those hours over things you want to do or sleep. This allows you to adjust the life balance such that you can maximize your own feelings of happiness and well being.

The final piece is the assumption that "work" is a competitive marketplace. There are more people able to work than there are opportunities too work, so selection pressure will reduce wages on opportunities that anyone can do, and raise wages on opportunities that fewer people can do.

I believe this is the context in which the article is written.

If that is correct, then to "win" (defined by maximizing your happiness and well being for the longest possible time), one needs to find the opportunities that pay the highest wages per unit time and out compete other candidates for those opportunities.

So what I took away from the article is that if you start with the skillss that come easily to you, and focus on those, you can quickly become very competitive for opportunities requiring that skill. That will maximize the available wages to you at any given point of time.

Personally, I always suggest to people they continue to explore other skills. That way you can discover still more things that come easily to you and open up still more opportunities. More choices here are always preferable to fewer choices.

And to this last point, (e.g. you're the best mainframe programmer, but the PC revolution has come)? I believe the skill here is "programming", not the platform (PC or Mainframe). If programming comes easily to you then switching platforms will also be easy.

Contrast that with "struggling to learn programming" where once you have mastered exactly one system you don't have any idea how to generalize those skills to another system. This article suggests, and I concur, that you're time would be better off on finding a skill that comes easily rather than trying to develop one that doesn't.

> Basically, if you're paid more you can work fewer hours while still meeting all of your financial obligations.

I think that this is trivially correct while being fundamentally wrong.

Most people work many many more hours and value their free time at relatively zero. Our social incentives are usually aligned with working longer and achieving consumer outcomes that are low “quality” (a bigger house with more debt is happiness?).

Even worse, we are encouraged to risk all our time during our work lives to obtain a relatively uncertain outcome: retirement funds are easy to lose and it is easy to fail to achieve retirement pleasure (poor health or early death, lost identity, missing joy).

We are all given fairly equal amounts of time, yet many fail to apportion their time in ways that give them lasting pleasure.

Edit: > This article suggests, and I concur, that you're time would be better off on finding a skill that comes easily rather than trying to develop one that doesn't.

I strongly disagree. Our success is often defined by our weaknesses, not our strengths. Watch the engineer fail because they can’t work with others; see the financial wizard fail due to addictions; see a friend fail due to a personality flaw that they ignore; watch an entrepreneur fail because they are deaf to valid criticism. These are hard issues to recognise and deal with within ourselves, and they need serious investment of time and effort. Working on our flaws gives good value even if all one manages to achieve is to learn to change a failing into a mediocre skill.