Escape Competition Through Authenticity
Keep redefining what you do until being the best in the world at it is true.
- Difficulty
- Moderate
- Time to result
- ~months to results
- Steps
- 5
- Confidence
- 87%
The instruction is to become the best in the world at what you do, and to keep redefining what you do until that is true. Both halves matter. You cannot arbitrarily decide to be the fastest runner alive; that objective is taken. But you can keep adjusting the objective until it converges on your specific knowledge, your skills, your position, your location and your interests, at which point being number one becomes achievable while remaining authentic. This is the mechanism behind escaping competition. We are mimetic creatures who copy desires from the people around us, and copying is what creates competitors in the first place. Stop imitating and the competition structurally disappears, because no one can compete with you on being you. The constraint is founder-product-market fit: authenticity with no market is the opposite failure.
Origin
Extracted from Naval. Naval pairs his tweet about becoming the best in the world at what you do with an unused one, escape competition through authenticity, and cites Peter Thiel's Supreme Court clerkship rejection as an example of being knocked out of a lesser game into a greater one.
Core principles
- 01Nobody can compete with you on being you.
- 02Competition is a symptom of imitation, and we imitate by default.
- 03Both the objective and the definition of the objective are variables.
- 04The internet turned niche authenticity from useless into a career.
- 05A completely empty market is a warning that you drifted past product-market fit.
- 06Getting trapped in a crowded game usually means winning a booby prize.
How to run it
- 1
State the current objective plainly
Write down exactly what you are trying to be the best at today. Vague ambitions hide the fact that you have adopted someone else's target.
Pro tip If the sentence would fit any of your peers word for word, that is the problem.
- 2
Ask if number one is actually reachable
Be brutally honest about whether you can be the best in the world at this framing. If not, the framing is wrong, not the ambition.
Pro tip Watch where you feel dread rather than pull; that usually marks a borrowed goal.
Watch out Lowering the ambition instead of changing the definition keeps you competing and removes the upside.
- 3
Redefine toward what you already are
Adjust the objective until it converges on your specific knowledge, skills, position, location and genuine interests. Narrower is usually better.
Pro tip Combine two or three things you are naturally good at; combinatorics make the intersection far less contested.
- 4
Check for a market on the other side
Confirm somebody wants the redefined thing. Authenticity plus no demand is as broken as demand plus no differentiation.
Pro tip A completely empty market is a signal, not a moat; heavy competition and total emptiness are both warnings.
Watch out You may end up the best juggler on a unicycle with no audience, even on YouTube.
- 5
Hold both variables simultaneously
Keep optimising being the best and what the thing is at the same time, iterating until you reach a place you can be amazing at while staying authentic.
Pro tip Smart bosses, coworkers and investors will push you toward what you are world-class at; let their observations feed the loop.
Watch out This is not an overnight discovery. Expect a long search, and expect the definition to keep moving.
In the wild
Naval's own failure case. Epinions was an independent product review site, and the authentic path forward was local reviews, the space that became TripAdvisor and Yelp, because a scarce local restaurant needs reviews far more than a camera with a thousand reviews on Amazon. Instead they were pulled into the comparison-shopping fight, merged with DealTime, and battled MySimon, Bizrate, Shopzilla, PriceGrabber and NexTag. Amazon then won e-tail outright and the entire price-comparison category went to zero.
→ A category-wide wipeout, caused by competing on a rival's definition instead of staying authentic to reviews.
Naval recounts that Peter Thiel was on track to clerk for a Supreme Court justice because everyone around him in law school wanted exactly that. He was rejected, and that rejection pushed him into business. The clerkship was a mimetic goal absorbed from his peer group; losing it broke him out of a lesser game and into a much larger one.
→ A forced redefinition of the objective produced a vastly larger outcome than winning the original contest would have.
Common mistakes
Copying the people nearest you
We absorb desires from whoever is around us: artists want to be artists, activists want to be activists. That imitation is the entire source of the competition you are trying to escape.
Fighting hard for a booby prize
Competition is blinding in the moment and obvious three years later. You are often one step from an adjacent, uncontested business and cannot see it while fighting.
Going so authentic that no market remains
Total emptiness in a market is a warning that you have over-rotated on authenticity and dropped the product-market half of founder-product-market fit.
Is it for you?
Best for
Creators, founders and professionals with unusual skill combinations who keep losing on axes where they were never going to be first.
Not ideal for
Roles with externally fixed definitions and rankings, such as competitive sport or regulated professions, where the objective cannot be redefined.
From the transcript
“become the best in the world at what you do. Keep redefining what you do until this is true”
“So you can escape competition through authenticity when you realize that no one can compete with you on being you.”
“you can keep changing what your objective is until it arrives to your specific knowledge, your skill sets, your position, your capabilities, your location, your…”
From the episode
How to Get Rich: Every Episode