Daily Musings: 15th Jan 2025

From Vishal Khandelwal's Notes - https://open.substack.com/pub/safalniveshak/p/rest-well-scott?r=1xt8m&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web "I have spent so much of my life feeling inadequate because I wasn’t the best at anything. I wasn’t the smartest writer. I wasn’t the funniest speaker. I wasn’t the greatest artist. Scott looked at that insecurity and flipped it on its head. He didn’t just admit to being a mediocre artist and a mediocre businessman, his theory of the “Talent Stack” was a revelation. As per the idea, you don’t have to be the best in the world (top 1%) at one thing. You just have to be in the top 25% of two or three things that rarely go together. Mediocre drawing + Mediocre business humour = Dilbert. Mediocre writing + Mediocre public speaking = A career. His success formula was simple: Good + Good > Excellent This concept gave me my confidence back. It told me that my weird, eclectic mix of “okay” skills wasn’t really a liability. We are, I learned, the sum of our unique combinations, not the ranking of our individual skills."

Reflections from my life: My CAT scorecard (it is a fiercely competitive examination with a requirement of being able to come among the top 0.5 percentile in a crowd of over a million aspirants for getting into the top tier B schools). I was very good at Quants and very good at Verbal Ability but nowhere exceptional in any of them (which was the requirement). However, with 99.01 percentile in quants and 99.26 percentile in verbal, I managed to get 99.72 percentile overall. It is perhaps true- " sum of 2 moderately above average skills is greater than 1 exceptional skill" So for folks who feel they are only average in their fields, please find another skillset where also you are equally average. Only requirement is that the skills should be complimentary