The Adjacent Skills Stack
Two ordinary skills combined create one rare superpower.
The Adjacent Skills Stack says that being world-class at one thing is great, but the real superpower is being good at two adjacent skills and combining them. The combination creates a category of one — not the best in the world at either skill, but the only person doing this specific intersection.
Olly arrived at it by accident: he learned languages himself, then trained as a language teacher, and the marriage of practitioner-plus-teacher produced a unique angle that became a $10M business. He sees the same pattern everywhere — the doctor who can present on TV, the HR person who learns AI, the finance professional who's good on camera.
The framework is a positioning tool. It tells you to stop trying to out-grind specialists in a saturated lane and instead bridge two domains so you become the obvious person for that intersection.
- Being top-tier at one skill is hard; being good at two adjacent skills is easier and often more valuable.
- The intersection is the moat, not either skill on its own.
- Distribution channel counts as a skill — the same knowledge moved to a new channel can multiply value 100x.
- If both skills are obvious, the combination won't be — look for non-obvious adjacencies.
- The bridge should solve a real problem someone with money has.
- Inventory your existing skills honestlyList everything you can do at intermediate-or-better level — including hobbies, prior careers, and 'soft' skills like writing or presenting. Don't filter for relevance yet. Most people undercount what they know.Pro tipAsk three friends what they think you're unusually good at — the outside view often surfaces hidden assets.
- Identify your strongest core skillPick the one you've invested the most time in and have the deepest fluency with. This is your anchor. The other skills will hang off it.WarningDon't pick a skill you only enjoy in theory — you need genuine depth, not aspiration.
- Map adjacent skills with multiplier potentialLook for skills that, when paired with your anchor, could reach a different audience or solve a different problem. Examples: medicine + presenting, finance + storytelling, engineering + writing, sales + AI.Pro tipDistribution skills (video, writing, public speaking) pair multiplicatively with almost any expertise.
- Test the combination on a small audiencePublish, pitch, or sell at the intersection. A blog post, a workshop, a five-client trial. The market response tells you whether the bridge has commercial pull.Pro tipIf the first test gets engagement disproportionate to your anchor skill alone, you've found the lane.
- Invest in the weaker skill until both are solidWhichever skill is the junior partner in the stack — usually the distribution side — needs deliberate investment. Hire coaches, take courses, study the craft as seriously as you studied the anchor.Pro tipOlly hires a Hollywood script writer to push his storytelling beyond the obvious finance-creator level.
- Brand the intersection, not either skillLead with the combination in your positioning. Don't be 'a language teacher who also speaks 8 languages' — be 'the polyglot who teaches the method'. The intersection is what people remember and repeat.WarningResist the temptation to add a third or fourth skill — clarity beats breadth.
Self-taught 8 languages, then trained as an English teacher. Neither was unusual alone. The combination — practitioner-who-can-teach-the-method — built Story Learning into a $10M business.
Earned £100k as a finance salesperson explaining products to clients. The same explain-it-simply skill on YouTube reaches millions and earns far more than the original sales role.
Olly cites the model: doctors who can present clearly on television don't need to be the best clinicians on the planet. The medicine + media combination makes them uniquely valuable.
Olly stumbled into the principle when he started his business in 2013. He had spent years self-teaching languages while living in Japan and the Middle East, then formally trained as an English teacher. Neither skill alone was rare, but the combination — someone who had actually learned hard languages from scratch AND knew how to teach — became the unique angle his Story Learning business was built on.
Reflecting on it later, he saw the same pattern in every successful creator and entrepreneur he met: a Dr Xand-style TV doctor, an HR person who learns AI, Damian taking finance sales onto YouTube. The skills aren't individually unusual — the bridge between them is.