Hi friends!
Welcome to the 10th issue of my newsletter.
This issue is a little late. Had a few personal issues on my end. But we will get back on schedule. Feb is in for 2021 and appraisals are approaching for few of you. So any introspective thoughts on your career yet?
So in this issue, we are talking about career moats for early employees in startups. I am going to share some learnings I had as well as advice shared by my mentors with me.
The career advice given is slightly unconventional but going against convention might give us the edge.
Know anyone for whom this advice would be helpful? Why don’t you share this article?
Photo by Ian Schneider on Unsplash
What is a career moat?
A career moat is a key competitive advantage that sets us apart from our competition in the field. It is our ability to protect our employability and generate sufficient financial returns.
We say we have a career moat - when we lose our job, we don't lose our mind. We are confident that we will find employment quickly with our career capital.
Job security is a myth. True job security is our ability to get our next job, and not keep our current one. We live in a world of constant change. What is valuable today may not be so tomorrow. Roles might be outdated, which requires our skills to be updated.
Career moats are built with skills. The best skills are so valuable and difficult to find that leaders are looking to recruit you. A rough metric to know if you are on the right path - are you getting inbound offers?
Qualities of a rare and valuable skillset
It isn't clear how to build the skills. Ex: Writing
It is unattractive or hard to acquire. Ex: Programming
It is a niche now but might be the next big thing. Ex: AR/VR, AI, Crypto
After picking up rare & valuable skills, we must strive to be the best in our field. The best writers, artists, engineers and thinkers have the deepest moats. Build a moat with skills and proof of competence - own and deliver metrics. Getting paid to learn a rare and valuable skill set is even better. While choosing a career move, keep an eye on the moat.
Thoughts on a new career
Will it teach us rare and valuable skills?
How will we learn these skills?
How this skill will help us become the best?
It is also good to think in terms of a unique combination - like programming+writing. strategy+tech etc. As we build our moats, it is important to show our skills and deliver value to an audience. The right networking can keep the doors open for our future careers.
For more thoughts on career moats, refer to the article: Career Moats
Three questions to ponder while thinking about our career
To reach the next level of our career, what's the next step?
How to measure our progress - what is important? (and what isn't)
Which skills should we learn to advance your career? (choose only 1-2)
To stand out with a single skill, we need to the best of the best. The top 1%. It is a long road. Alternately, we can pick a combination of skills. This could be our USP to advance our career. How do we choose our adjacent skills?
We are interested in this skill and spend more time on it.
What our organization needs and we start learning the skill to make a lateral leap.
The new skill complements what you already know.
A niche skill now but has the possibility to explode in the near future.
Here are a few examples of good skill combinations:
Coding + Design
Business Acumen + Data
Product + Data
Coding + Writing
A coder who understands design delivers a more aesthetic looking product. A way to choose the right skills to check for a lesser-known combination around us and understand that it is quite uncomfortable to learn. Or in other words, we require high activation energy to get proficient in that skill.
The upside of building a talent stack is vast. The downside is nothing. An asymmetric bet. A trap we must avoid: We must clearly understand the steps to understand success in our career. Pick the hard projects to showcase our true value. Not pick up easy projects that give a false sense of learning a skill. The best way to develop a skill: solve a problem with the skill.
Adopt a learn as we go approach and building a rough v1 version to get started. Consistent repetition takes us closer. Decent solution to a hard problem OR Awesome solution to a simple problem. Good self-accounting helps. We need to evaluate our weak areas honestly. Then, leverage strengths to make up. Set a learning path and keep building skills. (This activity must be ongoing and not just before a career change.)
Don't compete on intelligence; compete on a unique combination. Don't rely on smartness; rely on a different perspective. In the end, we need to convince someone of our value. Keep increasing our value by expanding our talent stack. The world is always changing. Our careers too change. To keep up, we need to develop our talents continuously and adapt. It is the Red Queen Effect.
We must focus on areas beyond our abilities. Our typical learning loop:
Start learning. Have a proper plan in place as we learn.
Struggle while learning. This is the toughest phase that we need to endure.
Make mistakes. The only way to avoid mistakes is not taking any action. This is not an option and we need to work hard, make mistakes and correct them.
Seek feedback on the craft and improve continuously. Keep repeating this activity on loop.
Quality practice beats quantity. Brazil is good at soccer since they play futsal. It’s soccer on hard mode: smaller and heavier ball, smaller space, hard floor. So when they play soccer, they play faster and better since they had an accelerated learning journey on futsal.
To level up, we need to find and create 'futsals' in areas of interest. Working at startups or starting our own business in our areas are potential 'futsals'. This is the age of leverage. We can get started without capital. Go through this article for more context: The Age of Infinite Leverage
We don't need extensive coaching also. There is no technique or a defined path to peak performance in many knowledge-based talents. Success comes from finding a unique path and not following a well-defined path. Curiosity. Consistency. Practice. A simple path (not easy at all)
The talent we build must be something we love. If we don't love it, consistency is difficult, and we can never build the skill. Ideal talent is the intersection of what we love and what we are good at. A good hack - We need to surround ourselves with motivated people who are on a similar journey.
Think of them as pacers in a marathon. Running alongside us and pushing us to keep going. When we see them up close, we know they are just like us.
For more such insights, do subscribe to @thelindazhang's excellent newsletter: Product Lessons. A lot of advice I shared is distilled from her writings.
Finds of the Fortnight (and few more days!)
Since there has been a little more gap, I have dug deeper to surface the best insights and tweet threads that have helped me. Since we are discussing careers, I have tried to share great advice on careers.
To begin with, I would like to share Gagan Biyani’s thoughts on superpowers - skills that can help us succeed in anything. This is extremely aligned with what we have discussed so far.
Personal monopoly, the idea crafted by David Perell is very close to the idea of career moats that we have discussed. Lots of great ideas and a framework to build the moat.
If at any point in life, if we decide to take the entrepreneurship route, this is really great advice distilled from multiple conversations conducted by the author with really successful people. Worth spending time to read and ruminate over this thread.
A Story that Seized me
In 1997 a religious cult called Heaven’s Gate believed a spaceship travelling behind a comet was heading to Earth to pick up true believers and carry them to paradise.
Several cult members pitched in to buy a high-powered telescope. They wanted to see the spaceship with their own eyes.
They found the comet in the sky. But there was no spaceship following it.
So they took the telescope back to the store for a refund. The store manager asked if there was something wrong. They said yes, the telescope was clearly broken – because it didn’t show the spaceship.
Our biases blind us from reality. Not upskilling and complaining that we are unable to get jobs is very similar to what the cult members did with the telescope. Build skills first and then use the telescope which is our networks to look for the right opportunities.
Hope you liked this issue. Any thoughts, comments or suggestions? Any suggestions on how to think about career moats? Feel free to reply by email or reach out to me on Twitter. If you think someone else will be benefited, feel free to forward the email.
"True job security is our ability to get our next job, and not keep our current one." This stuck with me, super writing Dileep