Building a Personal Monopoly: (thread)

How to combine competence, curiosity, and character to create a category of one.

1/ Competence

If we want anyone to spend their time, attention or money on anything of ours, we must first be competent.

Lots of people are competent, so there's lots of competition here.

Let's say this is "school teachers"
2/ Competence + Curiosity

If we add curiosity to the mix, competition starts to thin.

This separates the generalist practitioners from the irrationally passionate.

Let's say this is "school teachers who are curious about learning innovation"
3/ Competence + Curiosity + Character

Now combinatorics put us in category of one territory.

Let's say this is "school teachers who are curious about learning innovation, building a gamified school inspired by SpaceX's Ad Astra." (real example: @anafabrega11)
4/ Making it Tangible

All this is great until it comes to communicating it to the rest of the world.

Which is why bad packaging kills amazing ideas.

Writing, design, marketing — our job here is to lose as little as possible in translation from the intangible to the tangible.
5/ Basic Economics

We can use a very simple idea here, the "content" that makes contact with the market falls somewhere on this spectrum:

Commodity (could've been made by anyone)
Luxury (could only have been made by you)
6/ Supply & Demand

If we follow the logic from there, the demand for generic content is weak.

With "luxury" content, you control the market and you increase demand to the extent you can combine your competence, curiosity and character & communicate them without packet loss.
7/ Where to start?

This process takes a while, and these insights are often compiled in hindsight.

Here's a short thread that can help you get situated:

https://t.co/CbbdtQ1t2q
8/ How to Build a Personal Monopoly

All of the above is summarized from a 90 minute webinar with @david_perell, @anafabrega11 and I — you can watch it here:

https://t.co/empt0bYGAK

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THIS.

Russia hasn't been a willing partner in this treaty for almost 3 decades. We should have ended the pretense long ago.

Naturally, Rand Paul is telling anyone who will listen to him that Trump is making a HUGE MISTAKE here.


Rand is just like his dad, Ron. 100% isolationist.

They've never grasped that 100% isolationist is not 'America First' when you examine it. It really means 'America Alone'.

The consistent grousing of pursuing military alliances with allies - like Trump is doing now with Saudi Arabia.

So of course Rand has also spent the last 2 days loudly calling for Trump to kill the arms deal with Saudi Arabia and end our alliance with them.

What Obama was engineering with his foreign policy was de facto isolationism: pull all the troops out of the ME, abandon the region to Iranian control as a client state of Russia.

Obama wasn't building an alliance with Iran; he was facilitating abandoning the ME to Iran.

Obama wouldn't even leave behind a token security force, so of course what happened was the rise of ISIS. He also pumped billions of dollars into the Iranian coffers, which the Mullah's used to fund destabilizing activity [wars/terrorism] & criminal enterprises all over the globe
I’m torn on how to approach the idea of luck. I’m the first to admit that I am one of the luckiest people on the planet. To be born into a prosperous American family in 1960 with smart parents is to start life on third base. The odds against my very existence are astronomical.


I’ve always felt that the luckiest people I know had a talent for recognizing circumstances, not of their own making, that were conducive to a favorable outcome and their ability to quickly take advantage of them.

In other words, dumb luck was just that, it required no awareness on the person’s part, whereas “smart” luck involved awareness followed by action before the circumstances changed.

So, was I “lucky” to be born when I was—nothing I had any control over—and that I came of age just as huge databases and computers were advancing to the point where I could use those tools to write “What Works on Wall Street?” Absolutely.

Was I lucky to start my stock market investments near the peak of interest rates which allowed me to spend the majority of my adult life in a falling rate environment? Yup.