(2020-09-25) Torenberg Build Personal Moats

Erik Torenberg: Build Personal Moats: a competitive advantage specific to you that's not only durable, but compounding over time.

Legible, in the sense that your expertise should be easy to describe, easy to share, and makes people want to do both for you.

How can you find your personal moat?

Ikigai: the intersection of what you love, what you’re good at, and what the world needs.

Some other hacks to build moats include picking something that isn’t big now, but will be in the future (e.g. crypto in 2016). (bandwagon)

If you were magically given 10,000 hours to be amazing at something, what would it be? The more clarity you have on this response, the better off you’ll be.

It could be the intersection of a few skills. Scott Adams popularized the idea of finding the intersection of 2-3 things you’re best at even if you’re not best at any of them individually.

It could be a combination of expertise, relationships, sensibilities, and skills that you’ve accumulated over the years

Should you specialize or generalize? Either could work, but you have to actually be good at something. That’s a key concept. If you’re a generalist, you want to be the best at the intersection of a few different skills, even if it’s a few disparate things. The challenge is it's easy to lie to yourself & say that you're a generalist when in reality you've tried a bunch of things and you've flaked out when things got hard and then tried something else. You want to be at least great at one thing, and then apply that lens or skill to other categories. Some people who you think are generalists have also specialized. Malcolm Gladwell for example writes about lots of topics, but he's mastered the art of translating academic work for a mass audience. Tyler Cowen self-defines himself as specializing as a generalist, but he spent a couple decades going deep on economics.