DISCOVER YOUR

PERSONAL
MONOPOLY

with David Perell

writeofpassage.school
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Jerry Garcia once said you want to be the only person who does what you do.
And this quote inspired me to get to the idea that we're going to talk about in
this video. And that is why you should build a personal monopoly.

See the internet rewards, unique people. And the ultimate goal of a personal
monopoly is to become the best in the world at what you do. Now, let me be
clear. We don't want to confuse theory with practice.

You can absolutely be successful without being the only person in the world
who does what you do, but that's actually a pretty good goal to aim for. And
that's because it forces you to think differently and to differentiate yourself. And
so, the underlying principle here is that you're differentiating yourself by
combining valuable skills that aren't usually found together. And then you're
telling the world about how you can give it value by sharing your knowledge.

So what is a personal monopoly?

Well, it can be a lot of things. It can be a mix of things like unique intersections
of ideas and interests, skill sets, personality traits, and many other things. But
when it comes to the wide array of ideas and aspects of your personality that
you can apply to a personal monopoly, I want you to define them as specifically
as possible.

So, for example, let's talk about interests. Say that you're interested in art.

Well, you don't just want to stop at being interested in art. You want to keep
pressing double-click on that idea. So you might be interested in painting, but
that's still not even far enough. You want to get to something like “I write
articles about how impressionism and cubism led to new ways of seeing the
world in the early 20th century”.

When it comes to layering a collection of skills in your personal monopoly, there

are some other things that I want you to think about too. Things like personality
traits, distribution channels, concrete technical skills, membership in some kind
of community (like what college you went to or a club that you're a part of),
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languages that you speak, geography, where in the world you live. We once
had a student in Write of passage who was an expert at coffee making in
Iceland. We’re looking for experiences that you have access to, maybe people
that you know, certifications, or credentials.

And that then leads me to the paradox of specificity. Creatives fear specificity,
and they relish these wide-open territories. I mean, what's better than doing
whatever you want and being able to explore anything and everything!? But
being specific isn't nearly as constraining as it seems. I've actually found that
specializing can lead to more options and more opportunities in the long run.
My favorite example of this goes back to the 1970s. A guy named Bill James was
the security guard at a pork and beans factory. And in 1977, this security guard,
who was up to very little in his career, published a book with a very exciting title
of “Baseball Abstract” featuring 18 categories of statistical information that you
just can't find anywhere else. And the book actually did okay. He put an ad in a
magazine called Sporting News, which led to roughly 300 orders in the first few
years, but they weren't just normal people who were reading the book.

He attracted some research scientists and university professors who were

studying things like physics and economics and statistics, as well as some wall
street analysts, and math wizards. But they didn't just read the book; they
mailed James their ideas, their criticisms, and their questions.

Now, who is this guy, Bill James? His work eventually influenced the Oakland
A's baseball team. It got to a guy named Sandy Alderson and then a big name
named Billy Bean, who eventually became one of the most successful general
managers in the history of major league baseball. And that book, published in
1977, led to the statistics revolution that we see in baseball today.

Now, what's the point? What does this actually have to do with a personal
monopoly? Well, the key to James' influence was that he wrote for just a tiny
group of people who were intensely interested in baseball instead of writing for
a mass audience. He didn't care about reaching as many people as possible. He
cared about reaching the right people. And this book was like his personal
website. Those ideas were like the “start here” page. And he used the paradox of
specificity to his advantage.

So as you build your first monopoly, you don't just want to throw a bunch of ideas out
there.
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There's this temptation where you say, “oh, I'm an artist. I can do whatever I
want, and I don't care what other people think”, but I think that you should
listen for cues. And when I talk about C.U.E.S., that's really an acronym.

C
The first C stands for complimentary. You want to find a personal
monopoly that's greater than the sum of its parts. And what I mean by
that is that you're going to have a collection of skills. And if you have a
bunch of skills, you want a 1 + 1 = 3 scenario where they can clash
together and create something really special.

U
The second part of the acronym is the “U,” and that stands for unusual.
And it's a combination of skills that you rarely see together. And I'm
reminded of a friend named Andy, who's an engineer with
unbelievable aesthetic taste who just sold his company to
Squarespace.

And his story begins back when he was 14 years old when he was just sitting in
his room as a high schooler, just scrolling on Tumblr. Those experiences led him
to Instagram, where he started an account called earth. And that account now
that account has more than 1.5 million followers. And even though he started it
as a hobby, collecting those images helped him develop really good taste.

And so, while he was building good taste over here, he was also starting an
advertising agency inspired by those experiences on Tumblr. And he started it
when he was 18 years old, and he started managing a team of engineers. And
by having the quantitative and very optimized ideas from the advertising
agency and the qualitative thirst for beauty from building this Instagram
account, he was able to see the opportunity for a company called “Unfold”
because of his unique experiences and his idiosyncratic blend of skills.

Now he didn't have this raw talent. He wasn't born with the ability to just build
companies, but what he had was a blend of skills that not many other people
had. And he doubled down on them.
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E
The E stands for experiential. And these are things that are inspired by
the unique events in your life. What happens is that we underestimate
tacit knowledge because it's things that we just know from our
experiences that we can't explain. And you see this all the time with a
really good basketball player or an amazing painter.
What they can actually articulate to you, what they can say about what they
know is so much less than what they actually know. And you’ll see this — when
the painter goes and goes to start sketching with a friend of theirs and their
friend is just sketching, sketching, sketching.

And all of a sudden the painter who's explained all the things that they can
articulate off the top of their head. They see what the other person is doing.
They say, “ah, you're missing this, you're missing this, you're missing this, you're
missing that”.

S
And the fourth part of cues is specific. And by that, I mean focus on a
niche topic where you have lots of knowledge. And my favorite
example is a friend named Patrick on the internet. He goes by Patio11,
and he spent years building software as a service business and using
online marketing as a competitive advantage for those businesses.

And because he's been doing that, he's been writing about what he's learned,
and he's focused on all the little aspects of marketing things like how to
increase the conversion rate in your marketing funnels. Things like email
sequences and social media. And because he studied this for more than a
decade now and has written about it, he has a personal monopoly in a very
small niche.

Let's talk about how you can build a personal monopoly.

And I want to start with something that most people get wrong. Your personal
monopoly shouldn't be something that you develop by looking out the world
and saying, “what's gonna be profitable? What's gonna be immediately
useful?”.

Your personal monopoly should actually reflect your innate interests and not
what you think the world wants.
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Let me explain why the internet creates these power law outcomes. You have to
love what you do. Because the internet rewards the people who are the very,
very best. And the audience for any topic that exists is numbered in the
thousands. So there's going to be an audience for almost anything you write
about. What's the most fun about this is that you can create your own topics.
The whole field of online writing, a way of thinking about it, of classifying it as a
specific thing, didn't even exist before I started Write of Passage, but I saw Write
of Passage as an opportunity to make “online writing” a thing.

And so I was able to invent an aspect of this field, but also I knew that it wasn't
just about understanding online writing or being good at it, or developing skills.
Any personal monopoly is not just about your skills. It's about being known for
the skills that you have.

And when you have your own distribution and an audience that you can reach
directly, you get to control your narrative in a way that just wasn't possible in
the traditional academy of universities or the corporate world either. You can
even take other people's ideas, synthesize them (give them credit, of course)
and use their ideas to add to your personal monopoly.

But you don't just want to stop with publishing. You’ve got to listen to people
too because it's almost impossible to just sit here in Write of Passage and know
exactly what your personal monopoly is going to be.

What this process is about isn't just sitting on your couch and just thinking.

It's about getting out there and publishing ideas and then listening to what
other people say because personal monopolies aren't found, they're made. And
sometimes, we're even blind to our own personal monopolies. We're like fish in
water, where we don't even know how to explain what it is that we do. And
often others can describe our personal monopolies better than us. And unless
we're listening, we won't be able to take advantage of the wisdom of crowds.

Well, what's happening is that all of us have the big upside of global markets.
When you write online, rather than just reaching the people in your town (like if
you did for a newspaper op-ed or the people in your university by writing in the
school bulletin) you can now reach people from around the world.
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I'm always amazed at how there are people in Write of Passage from more than
30 countries. People from more than a hundred countries read my writing every
year. And so you get to reach this global audience of billions of people, but at
the same time, it's not all good.

Things can be hard too. All of us deal with global competition. There are people
in other countries who are willing to work harder than us, for less than us. And
there are just many more people who are trying to build the same skills as us.

And so, because of global markets and global competition, the internet rewards
differentiation. Differentiation is free marketing.

And what I mean by that is that if you're one of many people who does
something … and somebody does a Google search for whatever it is that you do
well … there's going to be a lot of competition. And in order to be found, you're
going to have to buy advertising.

But if you do something that nobody else does, you'll go right to the top of a
Google search. And so when you build a personal monopoly, what you're doing
is you're playing a worldwide game that most people don't even know exists.
PERSONAL MONOPOLY WORKSHEET
Which of your ideas, passions, skill sets, personality traits, hobbies, or
characteristics do you find the most interesting?

Which of those interests has stayed with you the longest?

When they combine, which of these create something complementary that’s

more nuanced and interesting than if it were on its own?

Which of these are unique and hard to find?

Which of these are based on experience that’s hard to replicate?

Which of these allows you to get incredibly specific?

Which excites you the most?

 PERSONAL MONOPOLY WORKSHEET
Create your initial Venn diagram from what you've uncovered above:

Once you have an idea, it's time to try it out, get those ideas out into the world,
and then listen for feedback. We're here to help at https://writeofpassage.school/