From niche to leadership
“I’m not a businessman, I’m a business, man!”
― Jay-Z
Erik Torenberg recently wrote an amazing blog on viewing your career as a product.
This analogy can be extended to seeing career development as a product life cycle.
In parallel to product development, career development can be simplified into three phases: interest builds up a critical mass of expertise — which then unleashes itself through leadership.
Invention + Popularization = Innovation
Interest
A solid product begins with a unique value proposition. Similarly, career moats are built with a hard-to-replicate niche.
“Become the best in the world at what you do. Keep redefining what you do until this is true.”
— Naval Ravikant, Founder of AngelList
Not everyone is born knowing what specific interest they want to pursue. Luckily, passions can be developed rather than innate.
These actions help you define your unique interest:
Explore “the adjacent possible.” Scientist Stuart Kauffman coined this term to describe how one door of opportunity opens to the next — innovation begets innovation. Look at a budding industry or new phenomenon, and try to expand its frontier.
Intersect multiple fields. Rather than becoming world-class in a saturated career field, Dilbert’s Scott Adams recommends getting “very good (top 25%) at two or more things.”
Attend small interest groups. From Homebrew to Bloomsbury, informal gatherings play a pivotal role in successful endeavors.
Expertise
Overtime, your interest has an opportunity to evolve into expertise. This phase transitions your interesting value proposition into career/product development.
“I’ve come to realize that success is not a matter of attaining one’s goals. I found that when I reached each new higher level of success, I really remained unsatisfied. The things we’re striving for are just the bait. Struggling to get them forces us to evolve. And it is this struggle to our personal evolution with others that is the reward.”
— Ray Dalio, Founder of Bridgewater Associates, Struggle Well
Set challenging goals. Besides serving as “bait,” milestones are focal points for your interest to cluster into talent.
Accept newbie output. Sometimes people are discouraged by their first attempts. Paul Graham has tips on approaching early work with a learning attitude.
Solicit criticism. Ask people who like (or dislike) you to give some constructive criticism. Use it to improve. As Nassim Nicholas Taleb writes, “Antifragility is beyond resilience or robustness. The resilient resists shocks [of negative feedback] and stays the same; the antifragile gets better.”
Leadership
Now that you have expertise, it is time for the career/product launch! While products turn into companies, you become your business.
“It seemed wrong that only a few people with the ability to code could build websites and other software tools.”
— Ivan Zhao, Founder of Notion
Empower others with your unique skills. There are many avenues: teach, inspire, open-source, and mentor. Being helpful not only showcases your hard-earned “product” — it is also extremely gratifying.
Scale. Now that you have what Naval Ravikant refers to as “good judgment,” you can go from an individual contributor to a true leader. Depending on your situation, this could mean thought leader or business leader.
Keep innovating. We briefly mentioned moats earlier. Elon Musk debated this topic with Warren Buffett: “If your only defense against invading armies is a moat, you will not last long. What matters is the pace of innovation — that is the fundamental determinant of competitiveness.”
The purpose of a product is to satisfy an unmet need through scalable solutions. Similarly, the emphasis of career development is to learn something there isn’t a class for (domain expertise), and then popularize or even make the class for it.
Do you realize? The point of building a career moat is to let it down someday.
