A 2-minute guide to finding your success path
It just involves asking yourself one simple question
My favorite career advice is to develop a “personal moat.”
A personal moat is a set of unique and accumulating competitive advantages in the context of your career.
Like company moats, your personal moat should be a competitive advantage specific to you that's not only durable, but compounds over time.
Ask yourself this question: "What's something that you can do really well that's also really hard?"
More often than not, you will find that your skillset needs to upgrade in order to become a value-generation flywheel.
However, people who take time to build that personal moat are the folks who succeed! They are the ones who deliver exceptional value and hence, tend to be remunerated BEYOND industry standards because their output-value ratio is far higher than what the bell curve would have you believe!
They get there because their trajectory is not marked by promotions or appraisals but by total domination of their respective niche.
Some examples include:
Tyler Cowen: He specialized as a generalist, spending decades writing & reading all day. To recreate his encyclopedic brain would take 1-2 decades of deep work.
Elad Gil: He invested in more than a dozen unicorns and then wrote the "High Growth Handbook" to teach others about scaling startups. To match his track record would take 1-2 decades of hard work plus luck.
Tim Ferris: He has garnered a massive loyal following by posting unique content for years. Building the same following would take hard work plus luck, at a minimum.
Being the #1 person in the world with a rare skill is great. Aim for that and even if one doesn't get to the top, being #2 or #25 across the globe isn't bad either.
Have a good week!