A billboard that sat along the 101 Highway in the Bay Area in 2009 put it bluntly: “1,000,000 people overseas can do your job. What makes you so special?” While one million might be an exaggeration, what’s not an exaggeration is that other people can and want to have your dream job. For anything desirable, there’s competition: the arm of an attractive man or woman, admission to a good college, a ticket to a championship game, and every solid professional opportunity.
In the career marketplace, you are selling your brainpower, your skills, your energy. And you are doing so in the face of massive competition. Possible employers, partners, investors, and other people with power choose between you and someone who looks like you. When a desirable opportunity arises, many people with similar job titles and educational backgrounds will be considered. When sifting through applications for almost any job, employers and hiring managers are quickly overcome by the sameness. It’s a blur.
If you want to chart a course that differentiates you from other professionals in the marketplace the first step is being able to complete the sentence, "A company hires me over other professionals because..." How are you first, only, faster, better, or cheaper than other people who want to do what you’re doing in the world? What are you offering that’s hard to come by? What are you offering that’s both rare and valuable?
As
Ben Casnocha and I talk about in our book
The Start-Up of You, you don’t need to be better or faster or cheaper than
everyone.
In life, there are multiple gold medals. If you try to be the best at everything and better than everyone (that is, if you believe success means ascending one global, mega leaderboard), you’ll be the best at nothing and better than no one. Instead, compete in local contests—local not just in terms of geography but also in terms of industry segment and skill set. In other words, don’t try to be the greatest marketing executive in the world; try to be the greatest marketing executive of small-to-midsize companies that compete in the health-care industry. Don't just try to be the highest-paid hospitality operations person in the world; try to be a top-notch hospitality operations person in a way that’s aligned with your values so that you can sustain your work over the long run.
Competitive advantage underpins all career strategy. It helps answer the classic question, "What should I be doing with my life?" It helps you decide which opportunities to pursue. It guides you in how you should be investing in yourself. Because all of these things change, assessing and evaluating your competitive advantage is a lifelong process, not something you do once.
Three Puzzle Pieces Inform Your Career Direction and Competitive Advantage
Your competitive advantage is formed by the interplay of three different, ever-changing forces: your assets, your aspirations/values, and the market realities, i.e., the supply and demand for what you as a professional have to offer the marketplace. The best life direction has you pursuing worthy aspirations, using your assets, while navigating the market realities.
Your Assets
Assets are what you have right now. Before dreaming about the future or making plans, you need to articulate what you already have going for you.
You have two types of career assets to keep track of: soft and hard. Soft assets are things you can’t trade directly for money. They’re the intangible contributors to career success: the knowledge and information in your brain; professional connections and the trust you’ve built up with them; skills you’ve mastered; your reputation and personal brand; your strengths (things that come easily to you).
Hard assets are what you’d typically list on a balance sheet: the cash in your wallet; the stocks you own; physical possessions like your desk and laptop. These matter because when you have an economic cushion, you can more aggressively make moves that entail downside financial risk. For example, you could take six months off to learn the Ruby programming language with no pay, or shift to pursue a lower-paying, but more stimulating, job opportunity. During a career transition, someone who can go six to twelve months without earning money has different options--indeed, a meaningful advantage--over someone who can’t go more than a month or two without a paycheck.
Soft assets are more difficult to tally than cash in a bank account, but assuming your basic economic needs are taken care of, soft assets are ultimately more important. Dominating a professional project at work has little do with how much dough you’ve socked away in a savings account; what matters are skills, connections, experiences. Because soft assets may be abstract, there’s a tendency for people to underestimate them when pondering career strategy. People list impressive-sounding-yet-vague statements like “I have two years of experience working at a marketing firm . . . ” instead of specifying, explicitly and clearly, what they are able to do because of those two years of experience. One of the best ways to remember how rich you are in intangible wealth--that is, the value of your soft assets--is to go to a networking event and ask people about their professional problems or needs. You’ll be surprised how many times you have a helpful idea, know somebody relevant, or think to yourself, “I could solve that pretty easily.” Often it’s when you come in contact with challenges other people find hard but you find easy that you know you’re in possession of a valuable soft asset.
Usually, however, single assets in isolation don’t have much value. A competitive edge emerges when you combine different skills, experiences, and connections. For example,
Joi Ito, a friend and head of the MIT Media Lab, was born in Japan but raised in Michigan. In his mid-twenties he moved back to Japan and set up one of the first commercial Internet service providers there. He also kept developing connections in the United States, investing in Silicon Valley start-ups like Flickr and Twitter, establishing the Japanese subsidiary for the early American blogging company Six Apart, and more recently helping to establish LinkedIn Japan. Is Joi the only person with start-up experience who does angel investing in the Valley? No. Is he the only person with roots in both the United States and Japan? No. But combining these transpacific, bilingual, tech-industry assets gives him a competitive advantage over other investors and entrepreneurs.
Your Aspirations and Values
Aspirations and values are the second consideration. Aspirations include your deepest wishes, ideas, goals, and vision of the future, regardless of the state of the external world or your existing asset mix. This piece of the puzzle includes your core values, or what’s important to you in life, be it knowledge, autonomy, money, integrity, power, and so on. You may not be able to achieve all your aspirations or build a life that incorporates all your values. And they will certainly change over time. But you should at least orient yourself in the direction of a pole star, even if it changes.
Aspirations and values are equally important pieces of your career competitive advantage quite simply because when you’re doing work you care about, you are able to do it longer and better. The person passionate about what he or she is doing will outwork and outlast the guy motivated solely by making money. It can be easy to forget this when heading the start-up of you. In an effort to scrappily improve on who you are today you can lose track of who you aspire to be in the future. For example, if you’re currently an analyst at Morgan Stanley, the savviest way to leverage your existing assets may be to angle for a promotion within the firm. If the banking industry is in a slump, the savviest way to attend to the market realities may be to develop skills in a different but related industry, like accounting. But would these moves reflect what you really care about?
That said, and contrary to what many best-selling authors and motivational gurus would have you believe, there is not a “true self” deep within that you can uncover via introspection and that will point you in the right direction. Yes, your aspirations shape what you do. But your aspirations are themselves shaped by your actions and experiences. You remake yourself as you grow and as the world changes. Your identity doesn’t get found. It emerges.
The Market Realities
The realities of the world you live in is the final piece of the puzzle. Your skills, experiences, and other soft assets--no matter how special you think they are--won’t give you an edge unless they meet the needs of a paying market. If Joi were bilingual in an obscure African dialect as opposed to the language of the world’s third-largest economy (Japan), it wouldn’t contribute to a compelling advantage. And keep in mind that the "market" is not an abstract thing. It consists of the people who make decisions that affect you and whose needs you must serve: your boss, your coworkers, your clients, your direct reports, and others. How badly do they need what you have to offer, and if they need it, do you offer value that’s better than the competition?
It’s often said that entrepreneurs are dreamers. True. But good entrepreneurs are also firmly grounded in what’s available and possible right now. Specifically, entrepreneurs spend vast amounts of energy trying to figure out what customers will pay for. Because ultimately, the success of all businesses depends on customers willing to sign on the line that is dotted. In turn, the success of all professionals--the start-up of you--depends on employers and clients and partners choosing to buy your time. It doesn’t matter how hard you’ve worked or how passionate you are about an aspiration: If someone won’t pay you for your services in the career marketplace, it's going to be a very hard slog. You aren’t entitled to anything.
Studying the market realities doesn’t have to be a limiting, negative exercise. There are always industries, places, people, and companies with momentum. Put yourself in a position to ride these waves. The Chinese economy, the politician
Cory Booker, environmentally-friendly consumer products: each is a big wave. Being in a position to ride them--making the market realities work for you as opposed to against you--is key to achieving breakout professional success.
What's Next: How to Fit the Three Pieces Together
In my next post, I'll describe how to fit these three pieces together to build a career that's fulfilling and that also develops a real competitive advantage. Before I do, please share in the comments section: How do you conceive of your competitive advantage as a professional?
