Much as I dislike Scott Adams' views on many things, he has some smart advice in a lot of areas too. His take on success is to find a few areas where you can be

Much as I dislike Scott Adams' views on many things, he has some smart advice in a lot of areas too. His take on success is to find a few areas where you can be in the top 25% and combine them. It's too hard to be in the top 1% of a specialty without natural talent, but if your specialty is the combination of four areas and you're in the top 25% of each of those areas, you're very likely to be amongst the top of the combined field - or be there by default because there's so few others doing it.