What’s the moat, buddy? Where are you compounding?
Something that Warren Buffet talks about often is Moats. Also known more commonly as competitive advantages in a business - these are defenses you build, are unique to you, can compound over a period of time, and typically have a high barrier to entry making them hard to replicate!
The internet and the world it creates (or replicates) is an incredible replication + distribution machine. Replicating and distributing atomic units of value - ideas, products - at large is abundantly easy. If information, access, thought processes are so easy to replicate and distribute - what is scarce, hard to replicate, and therefore by extension, is valuable?
I’d argue it’s our Value Systems - the soft, fuzzy intangibles that make us uniquely who we are. How we live these values can communicate who we are and why we do what we do to anyone/anything we interact with. Our own unique Culture Code, if you will indulge me. I’ve been reading Daniel Coyle’s Culture Code and thinking if groups have culture codes, so do individuals.
What we value: what do we give our time, attention, and money to; our goals, objectives, and mission
What we believe
how we uniquely deploy these and share these with the world around us: through behaviors and actions, what we say and what we do
We create (or stumble into!) our Culture Code, cultivate it - finetune it - nurture it over time. By its very nature, it’s very hard for anyone else to copy precisely and replicate exactly. It’s not necessarily monetizable (doesn’t directly lead to being employed, for example) on its own but without it, our shine and sparkle are a little dull. Trust is one of those. You can’t buy it but you can earn it: it’s hard to copy or build, easy to lose; once lost, very difficult to rebuild. Similarly, integrity shows up in what we say, what we do. What we read, how we communicate - there’s so much to who we are and what makes us so uniquely us!
The Stories We Tell, The Stories We Believe, The Stories We Share
Here’s what I believe: Everything else - our ideas, skills, competencies, capabilities - being equal, we’ll always prefer to deal with an entity - person or business - when our Culture Codes align. This intangible Culture Code will have an increasing premium in our replicative + regenerative + distribution oriented world.
I don’t have a list of these values or elaborate ideas on what an individual’s Culture Code could be/should be, only curiosity as a guide. We all embody certain values in a very unique manner, these interact with each other and show up in all kinds of ways. Look around you: This unique Culture Code carries us, our mythologies, and stories further.
We are memetic by nature. So why not demystify this and learn from the collective: understand our own codes, extend that understanding to another, and somewhere along the way learn and recreate how these codes show up when all our worlds collide.
On a Quest
These are the little things that matter to me, I am on a constant quest to learn more about what makes some people such magnets for other people, ideas, opportunities. This has begun as a simple experiment to collect, share, debate what I’m learning, reading, mulling.
Listening, engaging, and participating with another is to know that every challenge we have as human beings is universal. No single person is special. Together we can make magic happen.
Work-in-Progress: : Building and Learning in Public
Here are a few things I’m doing to learn and get better. Drop me a note if you have thoughts/comments, something to share!
I share questions that come my way and I'm curious about, I share notes on books I’m reading, plants I’m geeking out on. I constantly think about skills that are honed with repeated deliberate practice, and that gets better when we share and hone with another. For example, How do we listen better? Can empathy be developed?