Want to be uncommonly successful? Learn rare skills!

Stand out and multiply your success by cultivating skills that are both rare and valuable — not by following the crowd.

A recent Medium article by Michael Simmons makes a bold claim:

Billionaire thinkers like Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Warren Buffet and Ray Dalio didn’t get where they are by learning the same skills as their contemporaries.

Instead, they focused their learning and passion on rare skills, which gave them the unique perspectives they leveraged to create astounding levels of success.

Not surprisingly, one of the most reliable paths to extraordinary success is to blaze our own path, focusing on cultivating skills that are both rare AND valuable.

The world’s brightest thinkers are always looking for contrarian sources of information that are better than what most others are exposed to. They avoid the obvious books, websites and influencers. They look for outlying trends, patterns and concepts that are currently undervalued but have a lot of future promise.

What amateur learners get wrong

As Simmons points out, amateur learners focus on popularity as a proxy for value and tend to ignore rarity…