Escape competition through authenticity

“Escape competition through authenticity.” — Naval Ravikant

Competition is what happens to interchangeable people. When a hundred of you do roughly the same thing in roughly the same way, you’re forced into a race, cheaper, faster, more desperate, and the prize, even for the winner, is thin.

There’s a door out of the race, and authenticity is the key.

The logic is almost too simple to trust: nobody can compete with you at being you. The instant your work is shaped by the specific combination of obsessions, taste, and history that only you have, you’ve stepped off the track entirely. There’s no one in your lane, because you built the lane.

This is the deeper meaning of his other instruction, productize yourself. Read it as two halves. “Yourself” is the authentic, un-copyable part: the angle only you would take, the things you care about that others find strange. “Product” is the scalable part: putting that into a form, a service, a piece of software, a body of work, that can reach far beyond the hours in your day.

A thousand people will teach the same material. The one who teaches it in a voice no one else has, from a life no one else has lived, doesn’t have competitors. They have imitators, which is a compliment, and which they’ll always be one step ahead of.

The instinct, when you feel crowded, is to work harder at being like everyone else but slightly better. That’s the trap. The move is to go the other way, toward the weird, specific, personal thing that only you would make.

Don’t try to win the competition. Make yourself the kind of thing that can’t be competed with.