In a blog post about how to increase attention span, author Eric Barker suggests that those “who can sit in a chair, undistracted for hours, mastering subjects and creating things will rule the world …”

Barker offers five tactics for increasing your attention and focus in what some have called an age of distraction: 

Physician and creativity consultant Edward de Bono developed Six Thinking Hats based on the premise that there are multiple ways of thinking through a given subject.

To get the most out of the technique, he recommends that teams use only one thinking hat at a time. For de Bono, what makes the most successful teams so creative and innovative is an ability to tap the collective wisdom of their members and “think in parallel.”

As author Scott Adams points out in a Dilbert blog post, capitalism rewards things that are both rare and valuable. For people who want to do “something extraordinary,” he suggests two strategies: 

With the model of a software application’s technology stack in mind, Adams writes in a separate post that a person can create their own talent stack with the following formula: develop a variety of “good-but-not-special skills” that complement each other and, when combined, create a whole that is stronger than the sum of its parts. 

For Adams, the concept of the talent stack is responsible for his own success: there are plenty of people who excel at either writing or drawing, but there aren’t very many people who are even above average at both writing and drawing.

He writes that this combination, along with “ordinary business skills, my strong work ethic, my risk tolerance, and my reasonably good sense of humor” created just the right recipe for him to become a commercially successful syndicated cartoonist. 

- Attributed to Desiderius Erasmus in The Adages of Erasmus