Scan time: 2-3 minutes / Read time: 3-5 minutes
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Howdy rebel ideapreneurs 🦸♂️🦸♀️
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🙋♂️ Sam’s scrapped newsletter plan
Sam is an operations manager who wants to start a newsletter for small-business owners.
This week, he scrapped the plan again, because he decided he has no talent for it.
He explains things clearly, writes well enough, and knows his subject.
🧩 His struggle:
He compares each skill with the people who are best at it, so he never sees how rare his mix is.
On the train home, he clicks on a video with the true story of a singer
who also said he was only average at singing and at playing guitar,
and still built a fortune of one billion dollars.
The singer’s first album barely sold at all.
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🦜 The average singer who built Margaritaville
In 1970, Jimmy Buffett moved to Nashville to become a country singer.
To pay the bills, he wrote news stories for Billboard, a magazine about the music business.
That same year, he put out his first album.
It sold 324 copies.
His friend Jerry Jeff Walker, another singer, convinced him to visit Key West,
a small island at the southern tip of Florida.
Jimmy loved it, and he stayed.
He played in the local clubs.
He wrote songs about island life, full of sailors, pirates, and people who spent their days on the beach.
He never pretended to be a great musician.
Years later, he said it himself: “I’m an average singer, I’m an average guitar player.”
But he knew he could tell a funny story, and turn a concert into a party.
In 1977, he released a song called “Margaritaville,” about a man wasting his days in a beach town.
The album it was on went platinum that year, selling a million copies.
Get this — then he turned the song into a business.
In 1985, he opened his first Margaritaville store.
Later, he started writing books.
Three of them reached No. 1 on The New York Times best-seller list.
He was one of very few writers ever to reach No. 1 on both its fiction list and its nonfiction list.
The Margaritaville store grew into restaurants, resorts, drinks and clothes, all with the Margaritaville name.
By 2023, there were 150 Margaritaville restaurants and more than 30 Margaritaville resorts.
That year, Forbes estimated his fortune at one billion dollars.
Plenty of singers had better voices.
Plenty of guitar players played better than he did.
But almost nobody could write the songs, tell the stories, write the books,
and put all of it into restaurants and resorts people wanted to visit.
His ordinary skills, put together, built something no single great skill could have built.
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🔥 The recipe
➡️ The Talent Stack
Jimmy Buffett called himself an average singer and an average guitar player,
and he still built a fortune of one billion dollars.
He had a handful of ordinary skills that happened to fit together.
This approach is called The Talent Stack.
Turns out a mix like that is harder to copy than being world-class at one thing,
because anybody can go and learn the one thing.
So you stop trying to become the best at anything.
You already have your edge.
It’s the handful of ordinary things you’re only okay at.
AI can now do any one of those skills okay.
Your mix of them is the part it can’t copy.
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🛠️ Sam’s turn
Remember Sam, the operations manager who scrapped his newsletter plan because he decided he has no talent for it?
That evening, he runs the prompt at the bottom of this email, and gives it the five or six things he is decent at.
The reply from his AI sidekick is short:
Almost nobody who runs a business’s daily operations can also explain them in plain words, so that mix is your edge.
Sam stops comparing himself with the writers he admires.
That weekend, he writes his first issue, about the weekly checklist he uses to run his team.
On Monday, he sends it to forty small-business owners he knows.
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🌅 Four months later
Sam has sent an issue every Monday since.
Two hundred small-business owners read it now.
Last week, a bakery owner wrote back to say his checklist saves her an hour every morning.
You’re probably decent at a few things, and not the best at any of them.
That mix can be your edge.
Write down every ordinary skill you have, and look at what those skills can do together.
That’s it, my fellow mavericks!
Yours ‘helping you build a smart AI sidekick so you can work less and enjoy life more’ Vijay Peduru 🦸♂️
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🏄♀️ The prompt
The prompt below finds the combination hiding in skills you have written off.
You just list what you are decent at, including the ones that feel irrelevant.
🧰 What you’ll need
Five or six things you’re decent at, but not world-class
- Include the one that feels irrelevant. Type it, or say it out loud with a voice tool.
- e.g. explaining processes simply, spreadsheets, running meetings, cooking, drawing simple diagrams badly but fast, and I know a lot about competitive board gamesWhat you’ve spent years doing that you think of as just your job
- e.g. eight years managing a warehouse team who did not want to be managedWho you would want to help, if you helped anyone
- e.g. small-business owners who do every task themselves
🚀 How to run it
Open your AI sidekick, ChatGPT, Claude, or whichever one you use.
Swap the three examples, the text inside the curly brackets, for your own, then run it. If your AI sidekick can already see your notes, you can run it as is.
🧪 Want to test it first? Run it without changing anything, and it will use the examples.
CONTEXT:
- Use my own material first. If you can see my sent issues, my notes, or my résumé, pull the real details from there instead of the examples below.
- If you know how I write, use my voice. Otherwise, write in a clear, warm, no-jargon voice — first-person, plain words, no startup-speak.
- If you know who my readers are, write for them. Otherwise assume small-business owners who want simpler systems.
- If I have replaced the examples, use only mine. If an example is still there, fill it in from what you already know about me, and mark it as your assumption. If you don't know anything about me yet, use the example exactly as written.
- Do not tell me to get better at any of these. The whole point is to use them as they are.
=============== INPUTS — edit these, or just run as is ===============
Things I am decent at but not world-class, five or six, including the one that feels irrelevant:
{e.g. explaining processes simply, spreadsheets, running meetings, cooking, drawing simple diagrams badly but fast, and I know a lot about competitive board games}
What I have spent years doing that I think of as just my job:
{e.g. eight years managing a warehouse team who did not want to be managed}
Who I would want to help, if I helped anyone:
{e.g. small-business owners who do every task themselves}
======================== END OF INPUTS ========================
Outputs:
1. My mix — the two or three of these that combine into something uncommon, and why that mix is rare.
2. Who else has it — roughly how many people plausibly have the same combination. If it is a lot, try a different two or three.
3. What the irrelevant one adds — what that embarrassing skill actually contributes, in plain terms.
4. What it makes — one specific thing I could publish or sell that needs all of them at once.
5. What to stop — the single skill I have been trying to level up that will not decide this.
Then name the ONE skill I have been leaving off my list because it did not feel serious.