Build Personal Moats
eriktorenberg.substack.com
Build Personal Moats
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Re: Build Personal Moats
#2Is the insight here that you should have comparative advantage at this? And that your expertise should be describable? Those two are useful.
Otherwise, "be really good at valuable hard things" is not actionable.
Re: Build Personal Moats
#3Blah blah blah, of course, it would be amazing if everyone could build personal moats, but guess what, very few people can.
There's one Elad Gil. One Tim Ferriss. If 10,000 people try, perhaps one of them could roughly replicate Tim's success. Personal moats are great. And incredibly tough to build.
I prefer advice that is actionable, and can bring results for most people following that advice. This one is not advice, it is wishful thinking.
Sorry to rock the party, but that's my view.
Re: Build Personal Moats
#4[deleted]
Re: Build Personal Moats
#5Is the insight here that you should have comparative advantage at this? And that your expertise should be describable? Those two are useful. Otherwise, "be really good at valuable hard things" is not actionable.
i think you can distill it down to:
“You don’t want to be the best at what you do, you want to be the only one that does what you do” -Keith Rabois
Re: Build Personal Moats
#6Is the insight here that you should have comparative advantage at this? And that your expertise should be describable? Those two are useful. Otherwise, "be really good at valuable hard things" is not actionable.
i think you can distill it down to: “You don’t want to be the best at what you do, you want to be the only one that does what you do” -Keith Rabois
Oh and don’t forget that whatever it is you do should be valuable to other people
Re: Build Personal Moats
#7It could be equally true that become indispensable, and often thereby expensive, to your organization causes it to seek your replacement, either in the form of people, tech or systems. Without proper scientific research on the topic of career building, we are fumbling in the dark.
Re: Build Personal Moats
#8I dunno... I got a lot of value from this article. Nevermind the impossibility of everyone becoming a reputable master of their niche.
1) working towards that has benefits regardless of achieving the pinnacle of noteworthy in the examples given
2) being self-aware enough to be able to articulate the value you bring is not something most people are good at, but it’s definitely something everyone should practice.
Re: Build Personal Moats
#9Blah blah blah, of course, it would be amazing if everyone could build personal moats, but guess what, very few people can. There's one Elad Gil. One Tim Ferriss. If 10,000 people try, perhaps one of them could roughly replicate Tim's success. Personal moats are great. And incredibly tough to build. I prefer advice that is actionable, and can bring results for most people following that advice. This one is not advice…
Agreed, I could only take so much of this blog post as it veered into self-help nonsense land.
But... I think there is some value in a slightly different take on the subject: develop a reputation for excellence in X. What that "X" actually is can be almost anything people and companies value: it can be a specific technology ("That guy/gal is an Oracle guru"), a subject matter ("If you want the expert on security, talk to Alice!") or an individual trait ("He is the most responsive person I know!"). I think this type of advice, while not foolproof (being known as the go to person for something doesn't mean other people can't achieve it as well), is something that is actionable for most people.
Re: Build Personal Moats
#10I found this article difficult since "personal moat" is used as a target rather than as the side effect of a behavior.
My experience here is limited of course to engineers and academics, generally technical people I've known over the years as they have grown professionally. The ones who have "moats" are the same people whose career choices have been deliberate rather than opportunistic.
When I meet people who are deliberate in the direction they are going[1], they invest more in the direction. So if someone is looking to become a great manager they seek out companies with good managers and try to learn from them.
As I interviewed people at Google, when I asked "Why Google?" and they responded "I've always wanted to work at Google." I would follow up with, "Okay, but why?" There were two general kinds of answers here, one was "because Google right?" and the other was "Google is investing in X which is something I'm interested in and I believe I can help with that." Opportunistic vs deliberate.
The people I've known that got really stuck were ones who found themselves in a "really sweet gig" which was not to hard, paid well, and over time it became harder to find people who could do it.
One engineer I know spent 25 years being "the Fax guy." He knew more about FAX, the history, the protocols, the problems in implementing it, etc than I will ever know. But it wasn't about how FAX worked, it was about knowing what people paid other people to work on when it came to FAX. And then FAX became a non-thing and he had no skills that any number of new college grads had. What he could have done was learn about digital signal processing and how you process signals to extract data in noisy environments. That has pretty universal application, but he wasn't working on FAX stuff because he liked FAX, or because he found the technology behind it interesting. It was just "in demand", until it wasn't.
So he had a great "personal moat" but he was also barrelling along toward being obsolete.
As a result I am not sure I can take the article too literally. Becoming a specialist is one thing, but there is risk that the specialization will become moot. You're moat doesn't do you any good if nobody needs your specialty.
[1] Which does not imply that they have tunnel vision with respect to other paths, just that they have an internal stack of values and reasoning that guides them in a particular direction.