Learn or leave the market

COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE
Competitive advantage is the key to quickly building your career. You 
need to understand your advantage clearly in order to be able to “beat” 
others. Knowing your strengths will also let you to find the answer 
to the question: “What should I do with my life?” This way, you will 
understand which of your abilities you should take advantage of and 
where you can apply your knowledge.
Identifying your competitive advantage is not easy, especially on your 
first try. This becomes apparent as you interact with three different 
forces, which tend to change:
▶
our assets (what we invest in);
▶
our aspirations and values;
▶
market realities and dynamics of demand.
Only after analyzing all these factors you can understand what 
to focus on in your competitive struggle. A career develops best when 
we pursue worthy aspirations, use our assets and understand the real-
ities of the market. In other words, you need to strike a perfect balance. 
Right now you are unlikely to be able to describe accurately each 
of these components — first you need to carefully study everything, 

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and the best way of doing it is to start doing something. First, let’s take 
a look at these three components so that you understand what they 
each mean. Let’s start with assets.
SOFT AND HARD ASSETS
Assets are what we possess right now. To make a life plan that you 
can actually implement, you first need to assess what you have and 
what you can use. For example, there is a reason why Donald Trump 
took up a career in real estate. His father was a well-known property 
developer, and Trump had the opportunity to learn from his experi-
ence, as well as take over his network of customers and suppliers.
In a similar manner, we all possess two types of assets that can help 
us in our careers: tangible (also known as hard assets) and intangible 
(soft assets).
Soft assets are something that cannot be directly exchanged for 
money, touched or counted. Soft assets include our knowledge, 
information, reputation, image, brand, personal qualities, and even 
professional contacts.
Hard assets are the amount of cash in our wallet or in our bank 
account, as well as any other property. Even your laptop is a hard 
asset. The most useful hard assets are the ones that give you 
an opportunity to take a break from work for at least six months 
or a year while looking for a new job.
As you can see, soft assets cannot be easily valued. For that reason, 
job applicants write their resumes in general terms, such as, “Three 
years working in a construction company,” even though it would 
be better to list what they learned in those three years. After all, your 
competitive advantage is the combination of skills, abilities, and 
qualities the employer requires. For instance, Joi Ito, head of the 
MIT Media Lab, was born in Japan, but he grew up in Michigan. At the 
age of 25, he returned to Japan and, using his American connec-
tions, set up his own company. This was possible thanks to a unique 
combination of two cultures (including the languages) he knew very 

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well — Japanese and American. How is this not a competitive advan-
tage? If you believe, you are lacking in some assets that would make 
you more competitive, just start developing them right now!