Best of July

**Jonathan Barshop** (0:18)
What's up, folks? This is Jonathan Barshop. I work behind the scenes here on MFM, and today we are delivering yet another Best Of episode. It's the episode that, frankly, no one asked for, but we're delivering it to you anyways, because that's what we do here. No small boy stuff. All right, without further ado, let's jump into this first clip. It's with Dharmesh Shah, the co-founder and CTO of HubSpot. And honestly, this has been one of my favorite clips of the year. Dharmesh and Shaan break down their Venn diagram for success in its absolute gold. Let's give it a listen.

**Dharmesh Shah** (0:45)
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 Shaan'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 Shaan's level or better and at copywriting. 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.
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 two circles and turn into a Venn diagram, the number of people that know copywriting really well and also know crypto really well is a hundred 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, so this is what I call it, the trillion dollar Venn diagram success, right? I just made that up. But so you draw those circles of your skills and say, okay, well, I am now not like one in a million, I'm one in a billion, right? Or one in five 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 one is like, what's your thing? What are your skills?
And what drives the value, how much value will that intersection create is two things.
One is how rare is that intersection, whether it's two circles or three 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 gonna 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 two things are so unrelated. 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 them. 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 the 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 also reinforce things that you're already exceptional at that will kind of drive that kind of that rarity. And that's what drives the overall value, which kind of brings me to like, and so when I think of things that I want to learn, it's like, okay, well, this is why I got into copy. It's like, if I can, and copywriting is another form of, this is communicating at scale is what copywriting is, right? Like it's in usually textual form. 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 six books on copywriting and took Shaan's class. That's not a common approach.