The way to be outstanding is to go after a niche and learn your way into the 20% of that field. For knowledge-based work this is not that difficult.
For example, a few years ago I stumbled upon payment fraud as an interesting area to learn about and quickly became somewhat of an "expert" in the industry. The whole Trust & Safety industry has only gotten larger ever since, and there's no shortage of product management/engineering/data science/program management/analyst jobs in this area.
The way to be outstanding is to go after a niche and learn your way into the 20% of that field. For knowledge-based work this is not that difficult.
For example, a few years ago I stumbled upon payment fraud as an interesting area to learn about and quickly became somewhat of an "expert" in the industry. The whole Trust & Safety industry has only gotten larger ever since, and there's no shortage of product management/engineering/data science/program management/analyst jobs in this area.