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Build Personal Moats

173 points by jger15 6y ago

renewiltord 6y ago
Is 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.
- jger15 6y ago
  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
  - Whirl 6y ago
    Oh and don’t forget that whatever it is you do should be valuable to other people
simonebrunozzi 6y ago
Blah 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.
- hn_throwaway_99 6y ago
  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.
- 0xEFF 6y ago
  s/personal moat/specialization /g Fixed it.
  - bonestormii_ 6y ago
    Well sed. And yet, a moat is so much less than specialization. A moat is a blog! A moat is a following! A moat can be pure reputation, apparently.
- around_here 6y ago
  He’s used a Japanese concept with a well designed venn diagram. He must be very insightful though. I agree with you, this isn’t a helpful or useful article.
- deepGem 6y ago
  I feel the same but in the end Erik does mention that the will follow up with more actionable items on how to build a personal moat. So this is more like an intro post. Somehow, there is very little importance given to values in all these posts. What really matters in the world ultimately is what you value, your integrity for example. That's something you can't earn overnight, and for sure compounds like crazy over time. Integrity is also not a standalone unit of growth. It is a function of hard work, discipline and sheer will power. It takes a lot of guts to not veer off into the grey areas or to not stick to your words. So, IMO, while skills based moats are extremely valuable - like for all the examples cited, character/quality based moats shouldn't be overlooked. Perhaps they go hand in hand.
- devmunchies 6y ago
  Yeah I agree with the article but the examples were predictable, lazy choices. Could have talked about more obscure people who have an interesting resume.
- jrott 6y ago
  The sum of it seems to be that you should strive to be really good at something. Of course that’s not super profound and I think most of us could come up with it.
- zwayhowder 6y ago
  I think he chose some really bad examples. They don't have personal moats, they have personal carrier battle groups. And combining ikigai with the moat analogy was also IMHO a red herring. One has little to do with the other. As a consultant my personal moat is a blend of my experience and current relevant knowledge. My 20 years in IT combined with my and MBA & my deep knowledge of cloud architectures is my moat. Previously it was my 15 years experience and my deep knowledge in automation. What makes my moat changes over time, and if I stop learning new things my moat will vanish.
- hobofan 6y ago
  > One Tim Ferriss Maybe only one person as big as him, but in the niches related to marketing, "growth hacking" and coaching, there are literally thousands of people out there that have built such a person cult around them and are making a very good living out of it.
- base698 6y ago
  This advice has made many millions of dollars. A decade ago knowing a little design, front end, and backend development would go a long way and give you and edge. Lots of people I know that are quite successful mixed opportunities in unique ways: construction and software, design and backend knowledge. Talent stacks are valuable.
- Sophistifunk 6y ago
  I think the concept might be OK, but the examples are mostly survivorship bias. Shame without said examples the article's very lightweight.
deleted 6y ago
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arkitaip 6y ago
It 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.
binaryorganic 6y ago
I 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.
- TheCapeGreek 6y ago
  Yeah, "obvious" advice isn't always obvious to everyone, nor always actionable. I at least take it as a reminder of the need to get some sort of unique qualifier in my career, and the idea of "you might not be the best X or Y, but you can be the best XY".
- wccrawford 6y ago
  Working towards what you like doing and what needs doing will automatically build a personal moat. So long as you are learning, you are building a moat. If you are not learning, then you risk staying at your same safety level forever. But none of that advice helps anyone, IMO. People who want to learn are going to learn, and people who want to avoid learning will avoid learning. It's not something you can really force on yourself without a ton of stress, and it'll backfire. You have to go at your own pace when the marathon is literally decades long. I will agree that there are soft-skills to be learned from this, such as figuring out what your personal moat is. And perhaps you might be slightly more thoughtful when selecting a new job to somewhat influence your moat-building. But most people don't spend a long time selecting the right job. They get one that exists right when they need it because they need to pay the bills. And they very, very rarely job-search while they have a good job.
ChuckMcM 6y ago
I 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.
- kshacker 6y ago
  Oh there are so many of us with those FAX personal moats. You work on something, a framework, a data interchange thingy that only you know, and over time others keep moving but you become the one indispensable guy ... until one day you are not.
hexbinencoded 6y ago
Maybe I'm wrong, but it comes across as encouraging knowledge-hoarding, omitting documentation, and other job-securing, second-stringer games like writing obscure code no one else can understand. That would be the mark of the unprofessional Milton jerk to be eliminated at the first opportunity. In general, always be working yourself out of a job so you can get promoted or find a better job elsewhere. Corporate employees retreating into their own worlds are a dime-a-dozen, professional badass go-getters are the indispensable ones.
stocknoob 6y ago
Look at the premise here: your life is a competition, a fight. People are coming for you and you'd better have a moat if you want to keep your position. Also, solve the ikigai which has 4 simultaneous variables to optimize. Protip: live simply, save at a decent rate, get financial freedom and you can solve the much simpler 3-dimensional ikigai.
- atoav 6y ago
  I definitely take life a little easier than most of my colleagues. The more they doubt their own skill the more they revert to scheming and try to make themselves irreplaceable — they do things purely because they think these things will fly, never because it is just the thing they'd like to do. I always wondered if — maybe — it is me that is too playful, too improvised, too spontaneous: what if they are right and I am wrong? I have always been intrinsically driven by a broad range of topics. This arguably served me more over the years than any moat plan of any of my colleagues. I could more or less pick what to do next, while they were in their most and more or less stuck there, often complaining about the size, shape and color of the moat. Moats are there to protect you from the outside, but they also stop you from being able to surf the waves and go with the flow.
  - Consultant32452 6y ago
    There doesn't have to be a "right" that applies to everyone. If you are living a fulfilling life and making ends meet you are winning. Same for them.
  - itronitron 6y ago
    My first real job/career out of college was a direct result of my taking a pure-interest-no-future-prospect-of-employment type class for three semesters.
  - darkerside 6y ago
    This mindset is also the product of a privileged life. With some exceptions, you need an abundance mentality to be able to operate without dear of losing your daily source of income.
deleted 6y ago
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drivebycomment 6y ago
I'd say this is putting the cart before the horse. You deliberately choose which fields and areas you work on, but once you've done that, you simply focus on delivering the most impact/value there. i.e. aim to add the most value to the people around you (the immediate team, surrounding teams, and the greater organization) and the society in general. By making the moat-building as a goal, you risk diminishing your impact and distorting your long-term path, ironically putting you away from building a better moat.
nl 6y ago
This isn't a very useful article. Marc Andreessen's "Guide to career planning"[1] is a much better piece for almost everyone. My takeaways were: 1) You probably won't be the best in your field. Aim for top 25% in two or more (disparate) fields and becoming the best at the intersection of those is achievable. (This is actually advice from Scott Adams that Andressen quotes) 2) Better to be a small fish in a big pond. [1] https://pmarchive.com/guide_to_career_planning_part2.html https://pmarchive.com/guide_to_career_planning_part2.html
klyrs 6y ago
I think the framing of this article is awful, and folks' responses here show it. I didn't build a moat, I found one, and I keep digging. Generalization is really quite valuable, because it helps you find a passion and from there, you can find depths. Plumb some breadth as you go down, and repeat. Or, don't. You can also just be good at stuff that there's high demand for, if you're the sort who keeps their nose up for the next thing to try. Otherwise, you might find yourself specializing in outdated tech. Which can be its own reward.
moltar 6y ago
Is Substack the new Medium? Starting to feel eerily the same in terms of content quality.
janwillemb 6y ago
Nice article, triggering some personal career thinking. That said, digging into your "moat" and specialising in one thing becomes problematic once you lose interest in it. I have always enjoyed programming for most of my life, including 20 career-years. Until I didn't enjoy it any longer per se. I was lucky to have the opportunity to switch to becoming a teacher in this field recently, but the last few years became increasingly boring.
bryanrasmussen 6y ago
interestingly enough at one time I built a personal moat, and then was so burnt out from the effort of building the moat (and maybe just a bit undisciplined to use it like I should have) that I went off to do other stuff for 4-5 years, then when I looked back my moat was no longer valuable, and I kicked myself for not taking advantage of it when I could.
dzink 6y ago
For the sake of good discussion about moats from different angles: The moats in the article seem to be for a public personal brand tied to a niche skill that could make you a go-to expert for a while (a tool for others to use). That may work if you want to be the next Jason, Tim Ferris, Naval, etc to attract people, jobs, deal-flow, or funding, but what if you don’t want to give up your privacy or be subject to constant barrage of demands from strangers (making you likely unable to trust or open up to almost anyone)? Here are some other valuable angles worth considering: In the corporate world rise in the ranks is credited to: PIE (Perspiration + Intelligence + Exposure) where exposure gives you 80% of the gains. (Source: executives mentoring at a large corporation) Also in the corporate world another saying claims: “Don’t ever become irreplaceable, because when you can’t be replaced, you can’t be prompted.” So owning a niche can easily backfire on you. From the founder side, you almost want the opposite - you want to know all the trusted, best people to talk to and for them to trust and know you in a non-threatening way. That means ears for the ground and attention to the needs of your network, not flags in the air. I would much much rather consult, trust, and listen to 30 minutes of feedback by Jessica Livingston than 3 hrs of Gary V. As a software architect I can maybe see ahead 2-4 years on what is possible. As a founder, thanks to my network, I can also see maybe 5 years ahead based on unmet needs on the radar of early adopters in whichever target market I dig into. That trust network grows over time and eventually rises all boats. Instead of a moat, you build a volcanic process that raises your mountain and the others around you. That signal can turn largely into noise if you become a public figure.
- fooblat 6y ago
  > In the corporate world rise in the ranks is credited to: PIE (Perspiration + Intelligence + Exposure) where exposure gives you 80% of the gains. (Source: executives mentoring at a large corporation) This is very good advice. Some of the best career advice I ever got, and the first thing I share with anyone asking for career advice, is to develop strong public speaking skills. Study it and join groups like Toastmasters to get some practice. Give internal talks. Speak at user groups and, as your skills grow, speak at conferences. This is one of the keys that unlocks that valuable exposure.
- AmericanChopper 6y ago
dandare 6y ago
This concept is dangerously close to the antipattern of information hoarding and hero culture. Yes, from your personal perspective building such moat can be advantageous, but from the company perspective - or if you are a manager and see such behaviour, you should: - Document "Hard to learn and hard to do" processes. Make sure new hires can understand these processes easily. - Seek workarounds for "Impossible without rare and/or valuable skills" processes. Do not reward hero culture.
- szhu 6y ago
  As someone who agrees with the article and also agrees that the listed antipatterns you listed are bad, I've observed that following these two steps you suggested can help actually help build personal moats: 1. Writing documentation is helpful for everyone, but it is more helpful in building a moat for the writer than it is for the reader. When I document hard-to-learn processes, I drill the process into my memory in a way that the followers of the process are glad have avoided -- a win-win! And by seeing the results of people attempting to follow my documentation, I get valuable feedback on how adaptable my processes are to others, which helps me easily adapt the processes to new situations even for myself. 2. Avoiding processes that rely on a hero avoids building useless moats. It's good to avoid processes that rely on a hero. Teams should try to replace hero roles with repeatable processes as much as possible, but after doing this, often there are some hero roles left. These are roles are usually done by people with an ability to do critical but unforeseeable one-off tasks in a way that's very hard to train or hire others for. I'd need to hire a team to replace each of these people! As someone who wants to build a personal moat, I actually want to work on teams that do this kind of "hero role pruning", because in those teams, any hero role I happen to fall into is one with actual value that's hard to replace. --- If I were to mesh together the article, your response, and my responses here to create a more nuanced criticism about the article, it would be that the moat one builds should come from things that are naturally hard for other people to do, not by one artificially making things harder for other people.
- benbennowben 6y ago
  If it can be done by a process, then document it and do it by process. It is not hero work. But don't underestimate hero work. Your local fire department does the kind of work that most people who subscribe to mundane management philosophies denigrate. At about age 30, as a new junior employee at one of the worlds biggest companies, I got involved with hero work for more than a decade without originally planning to do that. You can't find too many people who are willing to crouch inside a quickly nailed together Farday cage for weeks and write software that detects unwanted EMI, find cache corruptions caused by unwanted isotopes in solder or write custom microcode for weird signal processing architectures. There is absolutely no information hoarding, because every real challenge occurs exactly once and needs to be solved the first time before it can be reduced to a repeatable process. In between those assignments, I had a really tough time living through the attitudes of some of the anti-hero culture warriors. Eventually some of those mangers got together, tried to eliminate the culture all together and reform the former fire-fighters. Who wants to work in an environment like that? Not anyone like me for sure. I found myself fired at age 40. The spoils of a decade of such work are good enough that I don't really need to work ever again. But I can't stop doing it - it changes you. Started a consulting company to help many others deal with problems that process oriented people can't solve. If you are young and so inclined, I highly recommend hero work as a career. It is rewarding mentally and financially.
jondubois 6y ago
>> Get So Good They Can’t Ignore You From my experience this is fiction. If those who control the means of production don't like you or your personality, they will ignore you and actively work to suppress you. This happened to me. I was constantly overlooked for promotion and ignored in spite of an impressive proven track record and being a workaholic. After 2 years of delivering a lot of value and working like crazy, I quit the company in a dramatic way. I was so frustrated with my job that I had a breakdown and insulted the CTO in front of the CEO before quitting. I burned that bridge because I knew subconsciously that these people had already been suppressing me a long time, that if they wanted to get revenge after I left, it wouldn't change anything; they'd already been sabotaging me the whole way through. I was right about that because after I quit, the project's community ended up supporting me and I was able to continue my work outside of the company (I suspect my ex-bosses did try to sabotage me BTW). So yes, they can ignore you no matter how good you are and how hard you work. Members of certain minority groups within the company will understand this notion very well though it can apply to anyone. You may have to seek support from an entirely different group of people.
TedShiller 6y ago
Another way to put this concept is: The best resume is your name.
candiodari 6y ago
This is incredibly bad advice. If you want to achieve a great career, you need to "move up". This is one way to slightly increase the chance of not getting fired, at the cost of a guarantee you won't be moving up ... If you have zero ambition ... perhaps. If you want to have a great career, you absolutely want to avoid this way. And frankly, even if you have zero ambition at work, still a very dangerous game to play. Management might choose to force the issue by firing you JUST because you have a moat, forcing the org to build the knowledge that way. And, since we're talking about 20-30 year timeframes here, things go obsolete.
nobody2323 6y ago
The whole idea of an efficient cmpany is that everyone in it is doing something other people can't . The problem is, what if the person doing X dies tomorrow or starts making unreasonable demands. Becaue of this, companies like to design their positions so everyone is expendable. Really great companies, for a while at least, actually do assume something close to the perfect efficient company posture. It's how they enter a market, survive and thrive. Then the suits show up.
mathattack 6y ago
Seems like the personal most is more about being a public branded figure than an entrepreneur, coder or large corporate executive.
troelsSteegin 6y ago
Moats are about switching costs, towards protecting existing customer relationships. From a career perspective, your services are a product. Ideally your service offering is understood in your market to be valuable, and differentiated. The idea of the article is to be better than the next alternatives to your service in your market. I don't agree with "moats" as an image here; "ikigai", frpm the article is far more interesting. I think overall professionally you don't want to be associated with moats. You want to be a bridge - predictably useful. Bridges are easily understood, and get somebody someplace they would not otherwise get to.
mitchtbaum 6y ago
And fill it with giant gators.. Gators with fusion reaction chambers in their tummies Tell 'em, "if it moves, it's food" Tell who.. What a mess
hermitcrab 6y ago
"He specialized as a generalist" Hmmmm.
heipei 6y ago
Personally I feel like my personal moat over my friends and peers is a unique combination of my skills (hard and soft), combined with my experience and outlook on life. Even if someone desperately wanted to become "me" (god, I hope not) and even if I gave them an exact blueprint, it's not something that could easily be replicated. So, I'm a little doubtful of generic tips like these. My generic piece of advice: Collect a lot of different experiences, talk to a lot of people, try and fail at different things, and be honest with yourself, your strong-suits and your limitations.

173 points by jger15 6y ago

Is 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.

jger15 6y ago
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
- Whirl 6y ago
  Oh and don’t forget that whatever it is you do should be valuable to other people

simonebrunozzi 6y ago

Blah 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.

hn_throwaway_99 6y ago
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.
0xEFF 6y ago
s/personal moat/specialization /g Fixed it.
- bonestormii_ 6y ago
  Well sed. And yet, a moat is so much less than specialization. A moat is a blog! A moat is a following! A moat can be pure reputation, apparently.
around_here 6y ago
He’s used a Japanese concept with a well designed venn diagram. He must be very insightful though. I agree with you, this isn’t a helpful or useful article.
deepGem 6y ago
I feel the same but in the end Erik does mention that the will follow up with more actionable items on how to build a personal moat. So this is more like an intro post. Somehow, there is very little importance given to values in all these posts. What really matters in the world ultimately is what you value, your integrity for example. That's something you can't earn overnight, and for sure compounds like crazy over time. Integrity is also not a standalone unit of growth. It is a function of hard work, discipline and sheer will power. It takes a lot of guts to not veer off into the grey areas or to not stick to your words. So, IMO, while skills based moats are extremely valuable - like for all the examples cited, character/quality based moats shouldn't be overlooked. Perhaps they go hand in hand.
devmunchies 6y ago
Yeah I agree with the article but the examples were predictable, lazy choices. Could have talked about more obscure people who have an interesting resume.
jrott 6y ago
The sum of it seems to be that you should strive to be really good at something. Of course that’s not super profound and I think most of us could come up with it.
zwayhowder 6y ago
I think he chose some really bad examples. They don't have personal moats, they have personal carrier battle groups. And combining ikigai with the moat analogy was also IMHO a red herring. One has little to do with the other. As a consultant my personal moat is a blend of my experience and current relevant knowledge. My 20 years in IT combined with my and MBA & my deep knowledge of cloud architectures is my moat. Previously it was my 15 years experience and my deep knowledge in automation. What makes my moat changes over time, and if I stop learning new things my moat will vanish.
hobofan 6y ago
> One Tim Ferriss Maybe only one person as big as him, but in the niches related to marketing, "growth hacking" and coaching, there are literally thousands of people out there that have built such a person cult around them and are making a very good living out of it.
base698 6y ago
This advice has made many millions of dollars. A decade ago knowing a little design, front end, and backend development would go a long way and give you and edge. Lots of people I know that are quite successful mixed opportunities in unique ways: construction and software, design and backend knowledge. Talent stacks are valuable.
Sophistifunk 6y ago
I think the concept might be OK, but the examples are mostly survivorship bias. Shame without said examples the article's very lightweight.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

arkitaip 6y ago

It 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.

binaryorganic 6y ago

I 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.

TheCapeGreek 6y ago
Yeah, "obvious" advice isn't always obvious to everyone, nor always actionable. I at least take it as a reminder of the need to get some sort of unique qualifier in my career, and the idea of "you might not be the best X or Y, but you can be the best XY".
wccrawford 6y ago
Working towards what you like doing and what needs doing will automatically build a personal moat. So long as you are learning, you are building a moat. If you are not learning, then you risk staying at your same safety level forever. But none of that advice helps anyone, IMO. People who want to learn are going to learn, and people who want to avoid learning will avoid learning. It's not something you can really force on yourself without a ton of stress, and it'll backfire. You have to go at your own pace when the marathon is literally decades long. I will agree that there are soft-skills to be learned from this, such as figuring out what your personal moat is. And perhaps you might be slightly more thoughtful when selecting a new job to somewhat influence your moat-building. But most people don't spend a long time selecting the right job. They get one that exists right when they need it because they need to pay the bills. And they very, very rarely job-search while they have a good job.

ChuckMcM 6y ago

I 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.

kshacker 6y ago
Oh there are so many of us with those FAX personal moats. You work on something, a framework, a data interchange thingy that only you know, and over time others keep moving but you become the one indispensable guy ... until one day you are not.

hexbinencoded 6y ago

Maybe I'm wrong, but it comes across as encouraging knowledge-hoarding, omitting documentation, and other job-securing, second-stringer games like writing obscure code no one else can understand. That would be the mark of the unprofessional Milton jerk to be eliminated at the first opportunity. In general, always be working yourself out of a job so you can get promoted or find a better job elsewhere. Corporate employees retreating into their own worlds are a dime-a-dozen, professional badass go-getters are the indispensable ones.

stocknoob 6y ago

Look at the premise here: your life is a competition, a fight. People are coming for you and you'd better have a moat if you want to keep your position. Also, solve the ikigai which has 4 simultaneous variables to optimize. Protip: live simply, save at a decent rate, get financial freedom and you can solve the much simpler 3-dimensional ikigai.

atoav 6y ago
I definitely take life a little easier than most of my colleagues. The more they doubt their own skill the more they revert to scheming and try to make themselves irreplaceable — they do things purely because they think these things will fly, never because it is just the thing they'd like to do. I always wondered if — maybe — it is me that is too playful, too improvised, too spontaneous: what if they are right and I am wrong? I have always been intrinsically driven by a broad range of topics. This arguably served me more over the years than any moat plan of any of my colleagues. I could more or less pick what to do next, while they were in their most and more or less stuck there, often complaining about the size, shape and color of the moat. Moats are there to protect you from the outside, but they also stop you from being able to surf the waves and go with the flow.
- Consultant32452 6y ago
  There doesn't have to be a "right" that applies to everyone. If you are living a fulfilling life and making ends meet you are winning. Same for them.
- itronitron 6y ago
  My first real job/career out of college was a direct result of my taking a pure-interest-no-future-prospect-of-employment type class for three semesters.
- darkerside 6y ago
  This mindset is also the product of a privileged life. With some exceptions, you need an abundance mentality to be able to operate without dear of losing your daily source of income.

deleted 6y ago

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drivebycomment 6y ago

I'd say this is putting the cart before the horse. You deliberately choose which fields and areas you work on, but once you've done that, you simply focus on delivering the most impact/value there. i.e. aim to add the most value to the people around you (the immediate team, surrounding teams, and the greater organization) and the society in general. By making the moat-building as a goal, you risk diminishing your impact and distorting your long-term path, ironically putting you away from building a better moat.

nl 6y ago

This isn't a very useful article. Marc Andreessen's "Guide to career planning"[1] is a much better piece for almost everyone. My takeaways were: 1) You probably won't be the best in your field. Aim for top 25% in two or more (disparate) fields and becoming the best at the intersection of those is achievable. (This is actually advice from Scott Adams that Andressen quotes) 2) Better to be a small fish in a big pond. [1] https://pmarchive.com/guide_to_career_planning_part2.html https://pmarchive.com/guide_to_career_planning_part2.html

klyrs 6y ago

I think the framing of this article is awful, and folks' responses here show it. I didn't build a moat, I found one, and I keep digging. Generalization is really quite valuable, because it helps you find a passion and from there, you can find depths. Plumb some breadth as you go down, and repeat. Or, don't. You can also just be good at stuff that there's high demand for, if you're the sort who keeps their nose up for the next thing to try. Otherwise, you might find yourself specializing in outdated tech. Which can be its own reward.

moltar 6y ago

Is Substack the new Medium? Starting to feel eerily the same in terms of content quality.

janwillemb 6y ago

Nice article, triggering some personal career thinking. That said, digging into your "moat" and specialising in one thing becomes problematic once you lose interest in it. I have always enjoyed programming for most of my life, including 20 career-years. Until I didn't enjoy it any longer per se. I was lucky to have the opportunity to switch to becoming a teacher in this field recently, but the last few years became increasingly boring.

bryanrasmussen 6y ago

interestingly enough at one time I built a personal moat, and then was so burnt out from the effort of building the moat (and maybe just a bit undisciplined to use it like I should have) that I went off to do other stuff for 4-5 years, then when I looked back my moat was no longer valuable, and I kicked myself for not taking advantage of it when I could.

dzink 6y ago

For the sake of good discussion about moats from different angles: The moats in the article seem to be for a public personal brand tied to a niche skill that could make you a go-to expert for a while (a tool for others to use). That may work if you want to be the next Jason, Tim Ferris, Naval, etc to attract people, jobs, deal-flow, or funding, but what if you don’t want to give up your privacy or be subject to constant barrage of demands from strangers (making you likely unable to trust or open up to almost anyone)? Here are some other valuable angles worth considering: In the corporate world rise in the ranks is credited to: PIE (Perspiration + Intelligence + Exposure) where exposure gives you 80% of the gains. (Source: executives mentoring at a large corporation) Also in the corporate world another saying claims: “Don’t ever become irreplaceable, because when you can’t be replaced, you can’t be prompted.” So owning a niche can easily backfire on you. From the founder side, you almost want the opposite - you want to know all the trusted, best people to talk to and for them to trust and know you in a non-threatening way. That means ears for the ground and attention to the needs of your network, not flags in the air. I would much much rather consult, trust, and listen to 30 minutes of feedback by Jessica Livingston than 3 hrs of Gary V. As a software architect I can maybe see ahead 2-4 years on what is possible. As a founder, thanks to my network, I can also see maybe 5 years ahead based on unmet needs on the radar of early adopters in whichever target market I dig into. That trust network grows over time and eventually rises all boats. Instead of a moat, you build a volcanic process that raises your mountain and the others around you. That signal can turn largely into noise if you become a public figure.

fooblat 6y ago
> In the corporate world rise in the ranks is credited to: PIE (Perspiration + Intelligence + Exposure) where exposure gives you 80% of the gains. (Source: executives mentoring at a large corporation) This is very good advice. Some of the best career advice I ever got, and the first thing I share with anyone asking for career advice, is to develop strong public speaking skills. Study it and join groups like Toastmasters to get some practice. Give internal talks. Speak at user groups and, as your skills grow, speak at conferences. This is one of the keys that unlocks that valuable exposure.
AmericanChopper 6y ago

dandare 6y ago

This concept is dangerously close to the antipattern of information hoarding and hero culture. Yes, from your personal perspective building such moat can be advantageous, but from the company perspective - or if you are a manager and see such behaviour, you should: - Document "Hard to learn and hard to do" processes. Make sure new hires can understand these processes easily. - Seek workarounds for "Impossible without rare and/or valuable skills" processes. Do not reward hero culture.

szhu 6y ago
As someone who agrees with the article and also agrees that the listed antipatterns you listed are bad, I've observed that following these two steps you suggested can help actually help build personal moats: 1. Writing documentation is helpful for everyone, but it is more helpful in building a moat for the writer than it is for the reader. When I document hard-to-learn processes, I drill the process into my memory in a way that the followers of the process are glad have avoided -- a win-win! And by seeing the results of people attempting to follow my documentation, I get valuable feedback on how adaptable my processes are to others, which helps me easily adapt the processes to new situations even for myself. 2. Avoiding processes that rely on a hero avoids building useless moats. It's good to avoid processes that rely on a hero. Teams should try to replace hero roles with repeatable processes as much as possible, but after doing this, often there are some hero roles left. These are roles are usually done by people with an ability to do critical but unforeseeable one-off tasks in a way that's very hard to train or hire others for. I'd need to hire a team to replace each of these people! As someone who wants to build a personal moat, I actually want to work on teams that do this kind of "hero role pruning", because in those teams, any hero role I happen to fall into is one with actual value that's hard to replace. --- If I were to mesh together the article, your response, and my responses here to create a more nuanced criticism about the article, it would be that the moat one builds should come from things that are naturally hard for other people to do, not by one artificially making things harder for other people.
benbennowben 6y ago
If it can be done by a process, then document it and do it by process. It is not hero work. But don't underestimate hero work. Your local fire department does the kind of work that most people who subscribe to mundane management philosophies denigrate. At about age 30, as a new junior employee at one of the worlds biggest companies, I got involved with hero work for more than a decade without originally planning to do that. You can't find too many people who are willing to crouch inside a quickly nailed together Farday cage for weeks and write software that detects unwanted EMI, find cache corruptions caused by unwanted isotopes in solder or write custom microcode for weird signal processing architectures. There is absolutely no information hoarding, because every real challenge occurs exactly once and needs to be solved the first time before it can be reduced to a repeatable process. In between those assignments, I had a really tough time living through the attitudes of some of the anti-hero culture warriors. Eventually some of those mangers got together, tried to eliminate the culture all together and reform the former fire-fighters. Who wants to work in an environment like that? Not anyone like me for sure. I found myself fired at age 40. The spoils of a decade of such work are good enough that I don't really need to work ever again. But I can't stop doing it - it changes you. Started a consulting company to help many others deal with problems that process oriented people can't solve. If you are young and so inclined, I highly recommend hero work as a career. It is rewarding mentally and financially.

jondubois 6y ago

>> Get So Good They Can’t Ignore You From my experience this is fiction. If those who control the means of production don't like you or your personality, they will ignore you and actively work to suppress you. This happened to me. I was constantly overlooked for promotion and ignored in spite of an impressive proven track record and being a workaholic. After 2 years of delivering a lot of value and working like crazy, I quit the company in a dramatic way. I was so frustrated with my job that I had a breakdown and insulted the CTO in front of the CEO before quitting. I burned that bridge because I knew subconsciously that these people had already been suppressing me a long time, that if they wanted to get revenge after I left, it wouldn't change anything; they'd already been sabotaging me the whole way through. I was right about that because after I quit, the project's community ended up supporting me and I was able to continue my work outside of the company (I suspect my ex-bosses did try to sabotage me BTW). So yes, they can ignore you no matter how good you are and how hard you work. Members of certain minority groups within the company will understand this notion very well though it can apply to anyone. You may have to seek support from an entirely different group of people.

TedShiller 6y ago

Another way to put this concept is: The best resume is your name.

candiodari 6y ago

This is incredibly bad advice. If you want to achieve a great career, you need to "move up". This is one way to slightly increase the chance of not getting fired, at the cost of a guarantee you won't be moving up ... If you have zero ambition ... perhaps. If you want to have a great career, you absolutely want to avoid this way. And frankly, even if you have zero ambition at work, still a very dangerous game to play. Management might choose to force the issue by firing you JUST because you have a moat, forcing the org to build the knowledge that way. And, since we're talking about 20-30 year timeframes here, things go obsolete.

nobody2323 6y ago

The whole idea of an efficient cmpany is that everyone in it is doing something other people can't . The problem is, what if the person doing X dies tomorrow or starts making unreasonable demands. Becaue of this, companies like to design their positions so everyone is expendable. Really great companies, for a while at least, actually do assume something close to the perfect efficient company posture. It's how they enter a market, survive and thrive. Then the suits show up.

mathattack 6y ago

Seems like the personal most is more about being a public branded figure than an entrepreneur, coder or large corporate executive.

troelsSteegin 6y ago

Moats are about switching costs, towards protecting existing customer relationships. From a career perspective, your services are a product. Ideally your service offering is understood in your market to be valuable, and differentiated. The idea of the article is to be better than the next alternatives to your service in your market. I don't agree with "moats" as an image here; "ikigai", frpm the article is far more interesting. I think overall professionally you don't want to be associated with moats. You want to be a bridge - predictably useful. Bridges are easily understood, and get somebody someplace they would not otherwise get to.

mitchtbaum 6y ago

And fill it with giant gators.. Gators with fusion reaction chambers in their tummies Tell 'em, "if it moves, it's food" Tell who.. What a mess

hermitcrab 6y ago

"He specialized as a generalist" Hmmmm.

heipei 6y ago

Personally I feel like my personal moat over my friends and peers is a unique combination of my skills (hard and soft), combined with my experience and outlook on life. Even if someone desperately wanted to become "me" (god, I hope not) and even if I gave them an exact blueprint, it's not something that could easily be replicated. So, I'm a little doubtful of generic tips like these. My generic piece of advice: Collect a lot of different experiences, talk to a lot of people, try and fail at different things, and be honest with yourself, your strong-suits and your limitations.