I'm not sure what this has to do with the Jacques's piece. Being an expert is orthogonal to people paying you to be an expert is orthogonal to being a "one tric

I'm not sure what this has to do with the Jacques's piece. Being an expert is orthogonal to people paying you to be an expert is orthogonal to being a "one trick pony". You don't need to be "in the top 0.001%" to be seen as an expert, and I think you underestimate how easy/valuable it is to become known on the internet ("internet famous"?) as an expert on a narrow topic. Let alone how easy/valuable it is to become known in specific real life professional circles. At one point I completely accidentally and without any deliberate effort became known as an "expert" in a certain technology in a certain mid-size city, which led to a lot of work. I probably wasn't even in the 50%. I wasn't a "one trick pony" in the sense Jacques means either, I was just doing what people were paying for - I didn't even like it.