Michael's Musings #8 (25.August.20) - Know Your Competitive Advantage
Empathy, Leisure, Value, Arbol, Medicine x League of Legends & Storytelling
Source: PixaBay
✏️ What I’m Working On
The School of Hoop is in session and man, I’m picking up ideas left and right on both how basketball informs life and how life informs basketball. One salient problem for me recently is the inability to “finish my dinner.” I’m up to three articles now that I start, have no real idea how it’s going to end and it fizzles out with the friction of time. I’m currently working through another piece about competitive advantages. Hopefully this time, I can make the million-dollar move and not end with a five-cent finish.
Last week during lab meeting (picture a bunch of scientists at different levels coming together weekly to discuss project updates), the Principal Investigator (read: head of the lab) Dr. B reserved 30 minutes to refine our understanding of the scientific method.
We picked a random topic—wildfires in this case—and walked through how we’d engineer an entire project, from idea inception to proposing a research grant for funding. Having been in the world of academic science for 5-6 years now, I felt familiar with most of this process: generating hypotheses about how wildfires would affect California, finding metrics to measure the impact of fires, creating titles that marketed the paper to specific audiences, etc.
There was one thing that I hadn’t ever heard before—at least not in the context of science.
Dr. B asked: “What’s our competitive advantage?”
Competitive advantage? Like the decades of influence Nike has built into their infamous Checkmark? Or the extreme logistics advantage Amazon has over near every competitor? Or the benefits of economies of scale that Walmart enjoys? Or perhaps the competitive advantage the late Kobe Bryant had when he phoned John Williams, the Star Wars composer, to better learn how to lead a team after losing to the Boston Celtics in the 2008 NBA Finals.
That competitive advantage?
Yes, that competitive advantage.
By now, you’ve realized that I absolutely love building bridges between worlds. I hope to eventually make an honest living drawing insights from the worlds I inhabit to help us live our lives more purposefully. During that lab meeting, I realized that it is second-nature for folks in tech, finance, and sports to understand and leverage their competitive advantages. It’s not as commonplace in the academic and personal realms.
Let’s do a thought experiment together.
What’s the most recent personal project/goal you had? Maybe you wanted to train for a half-marathon or learn to better use your weak hand while playing basketball.
Were you aware of your competitive advantages?
If I wanted to train for a half-marathon (we’re venturing into real fantasy land now… I hate running), I’d most likely Google “half-marathon training workout,” probably have another templated Excel Sheet I won’t ever look at again and start running.
If I had consciously paused to think about my competitive advantages, I’d remember that my girlfriend is an avid runner—she ran the LA Marathon last March! I’d also remember that I a couple of different running shoes I could experiment with. I’d also think about the fact that my neighborhood has long expanses of straightaways to run and also some steep hills should I need them. Oh, and Wesley had an old Apple Watch he wanted to sell. Maybe that could help me better understand the analytics of my run.
One simple question brought to light a variety of advantages that I could possibly leverage and I’m certain that this framework isn’t being used enough in our personal lives. So next time you have a project/goal at hand, ask yourself:
“What’s my competitive advantage?”
💭 1 Thought
Source: Ivan Bertolazzi
Seriously, Stop Looking Down On Your Fellow Humans (Even If On Accident)
Yeah, John may not be good as Brandon at shooting. Yes, Wes may not be as laterally quick as John. Hell, Wes may be the worst basketball player you know. It makes sense; he just really started getting serious. Still, there’s always something to learn from Wes.
His thoughts on basketball are unbiased by the decades of experience that the rest of us have. He attacks the basket in a simplistic way—there’s no need for fancy moves if he can get his straight-line drive.
And where did he learn that effective simplicity? Well, Wes is an avid bodybuilder. With calories, macronutrients, RPEs, & reps among other things to track, the simplest solution is often the best one.
And this lesson transcends just basketball. You may have problems with maintaining a study routine. You might go straight to Montrezl, the top student in your class, and learn absolutely nothing—Montrezl’s systems are too complicated and his strategies don’t align with yours.
You might have better luck with someone you completely ignored, Lou. Unfortunately, Lou’s advice went in one ear and out the other. You undermined his opinion because you think of him only as of the “video-game dude,” the guy you go to when you want a League of Legends meme explained. If you had listened, maybe you would’ve learned that Lou’s gamification of his study habits, through a platform like Habitica, would’ve worked very well for you.
Albert Einstein (although it’s debated whether he actually said this) sums it up well:
Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.
💬 1 Quote
Source: Dominika Roseclay
I’m a little surprised by how many people tell me they have no hobbies. It may seem a small thing, but — at the risk of sounding grandiose — I see it as a sign of a civilization in decline. The idea of leisure, after all, is a hard-won achievement; it presupposes that we have overcome the exigencies of brute survival. Yet here in the United States, the wealthiest country in history, we seem to have forgotten the importance of doing things solely because we enjoy them.
Tim Wu (@superwuster) is a law professor at Columbia and a contributing opinion writer for the NY Times. He penned this piece, In Praise of Mediocrity, about two years ago and much of it still rings true.
I learned way back when there were two distinguishing marks of an advanced civilization was twofold: it had specialized workers and a portfolio of creative endeavors.
The first indicates that the people don’t have to spend all of their time doing everything for themselves or their nuclear family — they don’t have to go hunt AND take care of the children AND maintain the housing, etc. A group of people specializes as carpenters. Others as agriculturists. Others as fishermen.
The second indicates the presence of leisure time. And with it was the assumption that people pursued creative arts with that time. Tim notices that that model certainly hasn’t held in the United States and he postulates why in this well-written, succinct article.
❓ 1 Question
Do you spend time doing things you don’t need to do (e.g. arguing unnecessarily in a group chat, watching videos you don’t actually care about)? Do you also agree that “there’s never enough time?”
Why do you spend time on things you don’t want to do at the cost of the things that you do?
🙏 Infinite Gratitude
This Twitter post Wesley shared with our basketball group chat is absolutely gold. For those who don’t speak Spanish, “arbol” is the translation for “tree.”
This interview is a blend of two of my loves: medicine & League of Legends.
Dr. Alok Kanojia is--by day--a Harvard trained Psychiatrist that runs his own private practice in Boston, MA. He combines Eastern therapies (think meditation and Ayurveda) with classic western psychotherapy to treat patients that run the gamut from high-achievers with serious imbalances between their personal and professional lives (e.g. the managing partner at Goldman Sachs who feels like his/her life has no meaning) to people struggling with substance abuse.This video of him working with established streamer PokiMane is a masterpiece in clinical patient interviewing (something that I work on every week as part of the curriculum). Poki exposes some of the difficulties of having a spotlight at such a young age and Dr. K shows her why it’s completely normal.
Austin Calvert is an up and coming storyteller. I had the opportunity to link up with him this week over Zoom and talk about our respective goals—the guy’s dream is to travel the world and bring to light stories that needed the public’s attention. Here’s a masterpiece he created on a fan favorite, Naval Ravikant.
Thanks for reading!
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