Professional Moat Building
Let me start out by sharing a specific exchange I had with ChatGPT:
I’ll admit it: AI in general has me, as young Daniel would have put it, “rattled”.
Over the course of 2023, numerous immediately applicable examples of AI automation have come to the forefront of tech media. In combination with news of widespread, industry agnostic layoffs, it casts a shadow of uncertainty on many people’s sense of long-term job security. This outlook becomes even bleaker when you consider the journey of the following cohort of business young professionals:
- 2019/20 (Year 1): Started college in the Fall
- 2020/21 (Year 2): Softly committed to a business career path and potentially furthered that commitment with an internship (likely a virtual one due to COVID)
- 2021/22 (Year 3): Spent an half of an academic year virtually and began to prepare for their post-collegiate career path
- 2022/23 (Year 4): Started their career path in the wake of AI transformation and widespread layoffs
In comparison to this cohort, I had it easy. While this may be too Darwinian of a take on professional experience, I viewed the 3–4 years after I graduated as a time to build my “professional moat” — to become the fastest — and hopefully not the fattest — corporate rat in the race. From my perspective, attempting to build a professional moat amidst the dismal circumstances of the aforementioned cohort seems like an incredibly daunting task.
Similar to building an economic moat, I see professional moat building as a purposeful development of skills to uniquely and definitively add value to whatever process you find yourself involved in at work. By developing these skills, you help to mitigate against a involuntary, premature end to what could have been a rather lengthy, fruitful stint at a company (an end that almost 100,000 technology professionals have experienced in 2023 alone).
After ample amounts of armchair navel gazing and philosophizing about the impacts of AI and workforce reduction, I thought to provide some unwarranted advice to those individuals embarking on their professional journeys or those hoping to start a new one in the near future.
1. Try to Be Tactically Useful
Please read the following short article from Sam Leith at The Spectator:
There are “thinkers” and there are “doers”. What Sam Leith comically labels as the “surplus elites” are what I envision the self-proclaimed “big picture thinkers” to be at non-banking establishments. And to be completely honest with you, I have extreme distaste for those mid-level managers who claim to be “big picture thinkers” but can’t operate Excel above the abilities of a high school student.
Being in finance and having worked in in analytical professions for almost 5 years now, I’ve noticed that the most inspiring leaders to work for are those who can help management think strategically about business process and outcomes while being able to single-handedly crank out a scalable, heritable model to support those conversations. Learn the tactical skills early on and never stop learning as you climb the ranks.
2. Speak Less, Listen More
Honestly, I struggle with this one. Whether it’s a natural, innately human insecurity or mild case of self-delusion, I often feel the need to speak up in meetings just to be heard. This is causing more damage to my career than growing it — and it’s taken me 4 years and some change to identify that.
Unless you have an IQ of 160+ at 22, your value early on in your career will come from how instruction and thought given to you is translated into work product and process execution.
3. Invest Early and Aggressively
No — I am not talking about the power of compound interest, I’m referring to the investment of your personal time. Personally, it’s my opinion that work-life balance should be your priority at 32 (or even 42) and not 22. Additionally, It’s my guess that most people reading this in their early 20s 1.) Don’t have kids 2.) Don’t have major health problems 3.) Have ample free time.
This optionality and freedom from constraint should afford you more time to selfishly nurture your professional interests and skills. Even though it may have been occasionally exhausting, I’ve worked on plenty of interesting projects that had me burning the weekend midnight oil in my early 20s. While a handful of these were deadline driven, a majority of them were not and could have been completed during the routine 9–5. However, it was those uninterrupted, lengthy spans of thought and analysis — that I knowingly forced upon myself — which have continued paying dividends, both in terms of work product quality as well as the development of critical thinking skills.
I am receptive to the counter-argument that burning too much midnight oil at a young age can negatively impact your mental health and thwart meaningful social development in young adulthood, but I think that thinking is partially flawed. There is too much emphasis on the 3–4 years right after graduation and not enough emphasis placed on the remaining 30–35 years of your social and professional development. Furthermore, just speaking from personal experience, I’ve knowingly consented to these professionally-oriented investments of my time and am extremely pleased (not to mention overwhelmingly grateful) about where I sit at 26.
Concluding Thoughts
Ultimately, life is about making choices that you can sit comfortably when the curtains start to close. More intelligently put, when you look back at the set of decisions and their tradeoffs you’ve pursued over your time here, are you able to think “Yeah, relatively speaking, I’m pretty happy with this”? So far at 26, I’m confident I feel that way.
