Career advice: find your superpower, if you have one, and capitalize on that. To be fair, that only works for a few. Mine is understanding and making use of complex information very, very quickly.

Failing that, the best strategy to pursue (I stole this from somewhere, but forget the origin) is to be okay to good in several disparate but related areas. Most of your peers won’t take the time and effort to do this and instead they’ll only be competent in one small area. This makes them limited. Even though I do in fact have a superpower, I’ve relied more on this “many skills” strategy as it’s more beneficial in my specific field. For instance apart from my technical skills I am good at these things, all of which I am not a “natural” at (that is, I had to learn them from scratch):

• How to talk to executives and management in terms they understand
• Good social skills, especially as it relates to the norms of the corporate world
• Ability to distill information so the less competent/technical can act on it
• Understanding how a business works
• Negotiation of conflicting parties
• Various regulatory and compliance regimes and how they apply to business
• Perception management for me and my team
• Learning how to prioritize what matters to execs
• How to write a decent business analysis

And learning none of this to a “good enough” level requires being a genius! Just perseverance. That’s the advantage of the latter strategy — it just takes some determination. It’s like working out in that if you devote a couple of extra hours a week to acquiring 3-4 of the above you’ll be far ahead of your competition. Anyone can do it if they want to and I can guarantee it’ll benefit them.

This is exactly what I did and it’s why I am where I am.