Dharmesh Shah explains how combining rare, complementary skills creates outsized value. When two high-level abilities intersect, the pool of people with both shrinks 100× or more. A copywriter who masters crypto, or a developer who learns copywriting, enters a tiny, valuable category where rarity and reinforcement multiply earning potential.
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Yeah, there's one thing I need to say on this particular episode because otherwise it'll keep me up at night. Okay, so imagine— let's take a step back. I'm on a whiteboard, and the whiteboard, it's the universe of all possible people, everyone on the planet, and you draw a circle with one of your skills. So in Sean's case, let's say we put copywriting as one of the skills that he's in the top 1% or top 5%, whatever number you want to associate with it, and so that's the circle. It's like, okay, X number of people are at Sean's level or better at copywriting. Awesome. Awesome. Let's say we draw another circle that's, we'll call it crypto. Knowledge is just how crypto works. And that's a group of people, awesome. Rarer skill because it's newer, there's fewer people that know how to do that versus copywriting. We can accept that, it'll be a smaller circle. What happens though is if you intersect those 2 circles and turn it into a Venn diagram, the number of people that know copywriting really well and also know crypto really well is 100 times smaller than either of those circles combined, right? And this is, we see the same effect like in standardized tests. If you took the SAT or the GRE or the GMAT, there are people that are really good at English portion of the test. There are people that are really good at math portion of the test. But the ones that score really, really well are the ones that are good at both. They don't have to be the best at both because that's the thing that's actually rare is the combination of the English and the quant. Same thing here. So now imagine this is what I call like the trillion-dollar Venn diagram of success, right? I just made that up. But so you draw those circles of your skills. say, okay, well, I am now not like 1 in a million, I'm 1 in a billion, right? Or 1 in 5 billion, whatever that is. And if you can convert that into some kind of monetizable business thing or whatever, that's when magic sort of happens. So that's kind of thing number 1, is like, what's your thing? What are your skills? And what drives the value, like how much value will that intersection create, is 2 things. One is how rare is that intersection, whether it's 2 circles or 3 circles or whatever, how rare is it? And then the other one is how much does it kind of reinforce the other skills that you already have? So for instance, I'm a software developer. That's one of my— that's my core skill. I've been programming for like 30 years now. That's my thing deep down inside my core. If I combine that with— I'm going to go off and, which I could never do, become an Olympic-level swimmer, let's say. Like, also very rare. The intersection of that, it's like, okay, well, the opportunity that it reveals because the 2 things are so unrelated, it's like I don't know how I would take my ability to build a web app and intersect it with my, like, yeah, there's some things I could do, but I don't know if that would be that huge. But software development is applicable to lots of, if I was gonna be an academic researcher, if I was gonna go into music, if I was like other things, there's a lot more overlap to the degree that it's like those two, they reinforce each other. So software helps me do this and that helps me do this. And this is one of the reasons, so my advice here was as you're picking skills to acquire, acquire skills that are both rare, but but also reinforce things that you're already exceptional at. And that's what drives the overall value. This is why I got into copywriting. This is communicating at scale is what copywriting is. It's like, okay, well, I don't know that many software engineers that can copywrite really well. Like, literally, other than that have not started companies, right? It's like, they don't exist. But very rarely do you get like really, really good engineers that went off and read 6 books on copywriting and took Sean's class. That's not a common occurrence.
