Personal moat

Companies try to create “moats” to ward off competitors, but this is a useful thing to do at a personal level as well. What unique advantages do you have in your career and in your life? These things should ideally be hard for others to acquire, specific to your interests and values, and ideally legible to others. It should endure or even compound in value over time (related: Knowledge work should accrete).

Erik Torenberg suggests that one way to identify one’s personal moat is to ask: what’s easy for you to do but hard for others? Perhaps that’s something which requires skill in multiple fields which reinforce each other in some unusual way.

What’s my personal moat? I’m not sure. Insofar as I have one in the vaguely tools-for-thought-ish domain, I think it’s that:

  • relative to typical industry folks, I often think more deeply and carefully
  • relative to typical academic folks, I can make high-fidelity things that people want to use in real contexts

References

Build Personal Moats - Erik Torenberg’s Thoughts

Last updated 2023-07-13.