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I think that's a great observation.

One exception I can think of where you legitimately need to be decent at three skills is bootstrapping as a solopreneur.

You need to be able to code, design, and market your product.

Other than that, it does seem like "X + marketing" is what you need, though I guess "marketing" is an umbrella term (content marketing requires writing ability, public speaking requires public speaking ability, etc.).

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Sure, and I'm sure there are actual cases where being good at 2 different skills (not one of which being some form of marketing yourself) is relevant. Devops pretty much requires being good at both development and server administration. You're correct that bootstrapping requires multiple different skills, including some amount of business sense. There are many cases where having multiple different skills could make you the best in the world at that combo. But those correlations aren't random -- so lots of different people will be trying to be the best at the same set of skills as you, since they're connected as requirements -- and despite the article's premise, that's not the case the author's examples make.

The article really just makes it clear it's important to be able to market yourself. However "people able to market their skills achieve more than people who can't" is not as interesting an article premise as "How to Become the Best in the World at Something (by being good at multiple skills)". And the author went with the latter because, well, it's important to be able to market yourself well.

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