👋 Hey there! My name is Abhishek. Welcome to a new edition of The Sunday Wisdom! This is the best way to learn new things with the least amount of effort.
It’s a collection of weekly explorations and inquiries into many curiosities, such as business, human nature, society, and life’s big questions. My primary goal is to give you some new perspective to think about things.
I rarely read fiction, but my partner and her elder sister are heavily into fantasy fiction. Their philosophy is: if there’s no magic where’s the fun! I wanted to do some light reading this week, so I picked up the audiobook of A Game of Thrones inspired by them. Boy am I so hooked into it now!
The best way to experience fiction (especially fantasy fiction) is to listen. Even though I know the story, the book is super fun to listen to, especially while I’m cooking. If you have good books to recommend, fiction or not, do share with me.
A request: If you like this essay, could you do me a favour and hit that 🤍 heart so that it becomes a ❤️ heart? This helps me understand what kind of topics I should write more about. This also signals Substack that more people should read this essay.
Q: What is something about competitions that most people don’t understand?
Competitions are everywhere. Whether you are trying to get a job, grow your subscribers, raise funding, or get a new gig — you are part of a competition.
Your ultimate goal is to build a monopoly, and get out of the competition. Google has a monopoly in search. WhatsApp has a monopoly in messaging. But none of them were monopolies straight out of the box. In order to build a monopoly, you have to start out by being aware of the competition.
Whenever there’s a finite resource, there’s competition. It’s not important to lose your sleep over that, but it would be foolish to ignore it. Knowing where you are standing is important, because that helps you find leverage, and build a specific strategy.
The first step is to identify what kind of competition you are in. DuckDuckGo is in direct competition with Google and Bing in the search engine market. At work, you are in direct competition with your peers for the next promotion. In the job market, you are in direct competition with every other candidate.
Learn the criteria of winning early on so that you can identify your leverage. In competitive exams, scoring high is the only criteria — so you should know all the tricks required to get correct answers faster than others. But you also have personal strengths such as ability to study longer hours, or learn new things quickly. Coupling your strengths with the winning criteria gives you leverage. It’s (almost) impossible to copy that.
Similarly, while raising money, winning criteria — such as business growth, good unit economics, and a resourceful team — when coupled with your product’s USP, gives you leverage.
Once you identify the criteria, devise multiple strategies to attain it. For example, the project management app Basecamp finds new customers via their strong brand, word of mouth, the team’s opinionated tweets and articles, and the wildly successful books written by the founders. If one channels fails, another can kick in.
No matter which competition you are in, others have cracked it multiple times. Try to learn from them. The IIT entrance exams in India are one of the hardest in the world, but thousands of students have cracked them year after year. Their advice can be found on various online forums, coaching classes, personal interviews, and YouTube videos.
Even if a business is a first mover, there will be similar businesses in adjacent domains. Airbnb was a category of its own, but they had the hotel/resort business and the travel industry to learn from.
But no matter how good you are, you will not win all the competitions. In India, hundreds of thousands of aspirants appear for the Civil Services Examination every year. Only a fraction gets in. It’s natural to feel discouraged when you don’t make it. Here are these gatekeepers to your future, and they don’t think you are cut out for the job. It’s bound to hurt! Howard Schultz was turned down 242 times for a loan to start Starbucks. Walt Disney’s theme park idea was trashed 302 times. It sucked for them as well. But there are a few lessons here.
The first lesson is that the gatekeepers — your bosses, startup accelerators, VC funds, entrance exam conductors — are imperfect. All of them are doing their best with incomplete information. They are bound to make mistakes.
The second lesson is that a No for now is not a No forever. If you didn’t get into one startup accelerator, you can apply in another one. If you don’t get this time, you can apply next time. It’s not over!
Take a No as a Maybe. Especially when there’s a human involved. If you didn’t get that promotion, you can have a chat with your boss, and see if you can turn things around. If that VC rejects your presentation deck, send them a video instead. People have biases. Exploit them.
When things don’t work, you are likely to feel that the world is against you; that the game is rigged. Truth be told, the game is rigged. It has always been, and isn’t changing anytime soon. Many people choose to ignore the competition, and stop playing the game. That may save them temporarily from pain, but it won’t solve the problem. You are in the game, even if you ignore the competition.
The counterintuitive advice is to be aware of the competition you are in, without losing your sleep over it. Because if you play it well, the odds maybe in your favour. But if you don’t, you will lose.
Old New v New New
New technologies enable activities that fall into one of two categories:
Doing things you could already do but can now do better because they are faster, cheaper, easier, higher quality, etc. For example, writing a newsletter or creating a podcast wasn’t this easy 20 years ago.
Doing brand new things that you simply couldn’t do before. Blockchain, for example.
It’s easier to image the first category, hence it gets more attention, at least in the early days. But the second one ends up having more impact eventually.
They start out looking like strange toys that only geeks are interested in. Take the personal computer revolution that started in the 70s. It took years for the world to embrace it.
It’s obvious that we are early in the development of emerging technologies such as cryptocurrencies, machine learning, and virtual reality. They look like fancy concepts or toys now. It’s easy to imagine a better world without them. Just like it was easy to imagine a better world without computers in the 70s. But once they take shape, it’s impossible to go back.
It doesn’t mean that all fancy toys would become revolutionary as a personal computer, or a smart phone, but it’s important to encourage the idea of building fancy toys. Most of them would fail, but the ones that succeed would shape the future. That’s the only way the world can experience new things. Link
Life Rules
Nate Green is an author and a contributor to Men’s Health magazine. He shares 10 rules that had the biggest positive impact on his life. Here are my three favourites:
Spend money to remove a negative, instead of adding a positive. Once the essentials are taken care of, spending money to remove annoying things from our lives leads to more day-to-day satisfaction than adding new things. Getting a better mattress to sleep better brings more lasting satisfaction than upgrading the iPhone.
At work, focus on your strengths. At home, focus on your weaknesses. Work requires getting a job well done. Which means focussing more on what we can do. Increasing our strengths makes us better at the job. But in our personal lives, so much of conflict is caused because of our psychological weaknesses. Focussing on eliminating the weaknesses helps us become better as a person, and therefore build stronger relationships.
Focus on the 20% of the actions that will lead to 80% of the results. Most things aren’t distributed evenly. Often small number of inputs produce the best output. Out of your ten life goals, two may turn out to be worth more than the others put together. Identify them. They are worth all your time and effort. Link
Early Work
The biggest thing that holds people back from doing great work is the fear of making something lame.
All great projects go through a stage where they aren’t impressive, even to their creators. You have to push through this stage to reach the great work that lies beyond. But most people don’t even reach the stage of making something they’re embarrassed by, let lone move past this. They’re too frightened even to start.
This fear isn’t irrational. Making new things is itself a new thing for human beings. But it’s easier to start a new project if you think of it as a way to learn something new, and not as a way to get something—users, money, or fame—at least in the early days. Thereby, even if the project fails, you’ll still have gained by it. Link
Before You Go…
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I’ll see you next Sunday,
Abhishek 👋