Your talent stack...

Happy Saturday!

Interesting idea for you this week: the talent stack.

As a professional you have a specific set of skills.

Some people are accountants. Some are musicians. Some can effortlessly persuade others.

We are Salesforce professionals.

And the set of skills that you personally have, including your Salesforce ability, is your talent stack.

There are two ways talent stacking gets rewarded in the market.

One is the "best in the world" approach.

This is where you practice and hone your ability in a single skill to the point where you are among, if not the actual, best in the world.

• Michael Jordan in basketball.
• Magnus Carlsen in Chess.
• Serena Williams in tennis.
• Warren Buffett in investing.

These individuals are elite in their respective crafts and are all highly rewarded because of it.

Now, there are 8 billion people in the world, so it's tough to be #1 in anything.

Which is where the second approach to talent stacking comes in.

This is where you learn skills that work well together.

Say you're top 20% in the world at understanding the Salesforce platform.

And you're top 20% in the world at persuading executives to execute good business ideas.

And you're also top 20% in your ability to think financially about a business. To understand the numbers that make up the profit and loss.

You're not absolutely elite in any one skill, but the combination of these three skills makes you so rare, that you may be in the top 1% of the world with those three skills combined.

With these three skills you could successfully:

• Be a solution engineer who sources new business for a Salesforce consultancy
• Be an executive at a company that uses Salesforce and is responsible for company Salesforce strategy and execution with a team reporting to you
• Be a freelancer who is hired by, and works directly with, C-level executives to build out their Salesforce environment, commanding well over $100/hr and working only 20 hrs/week

You can think of this like an animal inhabiting a niche in an ecosystem.

“ Just as animals flourish in niches, people who specialize in some narrow niche can do very well.”

― Charlie Munger

And by specializing in your own self-defined niche (with in-demand skills) you can earn out-sized returns.

To sum up the talent stack concept:

• Your talent stack is related to your earning ability
• You're unlikely to be the absolute best in the world at one single thing
• Combining skills that work well together let's you niche down
• Being in the top 1% of the world in your niche with a combination of 3 or 4 or 5 skills is doable by almost all of us
• You'll be highly rewarded for building a scarce, in demand, talent stack -- the same way someone who is best in the world at one thing is highly rewarded

That's it!

I hope this email gets you thinking about some of the useful skills you currently have, as well as skills that you'd like to stack on top of what you've already got.

If nothing else, thinking in terms of having 3 or 4 interlinked skills will give you clarity when deciding what you want to learn in the future.

Have a great weekend!

Best,

Nick