Getting Ready for Tough Fights
How can you compete against tough odds? How can you choose a game you are more likely to win? In business, your career, academics- the competitive dynamics are important to think through and that’s what this post is about.
I hope this helps you as you try to navigate your career and learning. I’m someone who has gone the credentialed route at times but not others. I hope it helps you make good choices and prepare for tough competition.
None of this is meant to be discouraging. There is a great benefit to jumping into games without knowing and learning as you go. You can also be more ready to compete next week or next year if you prepare well and pick the right games to play in. These are lessons I intend to teach my kids as they navigate life as well.
I’ve gotten into exclusive schools- the US Air Force Academy and the Chicago Booth School of Business. I flew Navy helicopters, worked at Amazon and in investment banking. I’ve raised venture capital for a startup I founded. I’ve talked to people with similar tracks and here are some thoughts.
It is not fun to think of life in terms of scarcity, exclusivity, or zero-sum games. It is better to think about how to opt out or go around these situations to find games where you expand the pie. You certainly don’t have to go to a top college. You don’t have to pursue credentials or gilded institutions. You can avoid zero sum games now more easily than ever. You can be an entrepreneur. You can blaze your own path and create new opportunities.
However, there are some tough games you may want to play: getting into prestigious academic institutions, winning grants or scholarships, athletic competition, corporate advancement, political elections or appointments, being a neurosurgeon, or being an astronaut.
In most of these competitions “worth winning”, you are already competing against uncommonly talented people or in constrained conditions.
In these games, there are only so many spots. The supply is constrained. The competition is fierce. The rules are sometimes opaque or arbitrary. So, if you want to tackle some of these highly competitive games, it is best to go in with an understanding of the dynamics. What are you up against. What are your odds. What are your advantages. How should you prepare.
Athletic Competition
This is about picking the game you want to excel at and have many competitive advantages. I wanted to be a professional basketball player. However, at 5’8”, I’m well below the average NBA height of 6’7”. Being 79 inches tall is about 1 in 1,000 height. But then you have to be the most skilled and athletic of those who are 6’7” and not be injured and not be too old or too young. The odds… are not good. So, I was forced not to try and compete there. I had to find somewhere else where my talents were more exceptional relative to the competition.
If you want to play in the NBA, then at every level you have to defend uncommon athletes and be able to score against these uncommon athletes. You always have to perform to a high standard against people uncommonly suited to compete in that domain.
Academic Competition
When you apply to a school with a 5% acceptance rate, presumably you are competing against very talented applicants rather than the general population. It’s a 5% acceptance rate among the very talented.
Though life has more extreme outcomes than a normal distribution, it’s helpful to understand the odds. Let’s define a Competition Quotient (CQ) as set on a Bell curve and mathematically defined as putting all of human competition on a normal distribution curve. Half of humanity is above 100 CQ and half is below 100 CQ. 87% of humanity is between 90 CQ and 110 CQ. If you have a CQ of 120, then 97.7% of humanity has an CQ less than yours (the area under the curve to the left of 2 standard deviations to the right).
So, if you want to graduate with honors from Harvard then you have to get into a school with a 2% acceptance rate among talented people and then you have to finish in the top of your class after 4 years of academic competition. If that is top 10% performance at Harvard, then you have to beat 9 out of 10 people who all just beat 49 out of 50 people to get into the university. Those students who applied to the university were probably beating 9 out of 10 in their high school.
Business Competition
In running a startup, you have to outperform all the other startups you are competing against for customers and revenue. Then you have to outperform the cohort of startups seeking funding at the same time you are from a limited set of Venture Capitalist investors who have limited funds to invest. So sometimes you are operating where there are no gate keepers and you can bake a pie as large as you like. And in the next moment you are operating in an environment of extreme scarcity as you try to raise funds or land some exclusive partnership.
Competitive Advantage
The practical implication here is that it’s much better to compete where the competition is relatively easy but the rewards to you personally are high (emotionally, financially, whatever). It can often look like “The Rich Get Richer” when the children of Hollywood actors become stars or when the children of professional athletes become pro’s themselves. These are people using natural and social advantages. They have access, funds, training, expertise, genes that you probably don’t tailored to win the game they are playing.
Of course picking the toughest fight each time has its own merits- just don’t be crest fallen when you don’t win. Don’t misconstrue your self-esteem or self-worth when you don’t win in an arbitrary process
Know what you are getting yourself into and have a plan to win and a backup plan. Spend a long time preparing to win against long odds and differentiate yourself from talented people who are already very differentiated. Then have a plan on how to learn from wins and losses and be better prepared for the next thing.
Of course, the rules of games change too. Take music, art, and writing. It used to be that production and distribution of music and art was very costly. There was limited time on stage or in a gallery. It was expensive to get attention. Now because of computers and the internet, it is cheap to produce art and show it to lots of people. It turns out there are lots of incredibly talented artists and now they’ve cut out all the middlemen and king makers. We used to think there was a high bar for talent and limited attention. Turns out there an unlimited amount of attention to be shared and there are many more people who are highly talented, inspiring, and entertaining.
If you find yourself not finishing high in the competition you are in, think about changing what you are doing to win, change who you are playing against, or change what you are playing for. Also, think about forming teams of course. Turn competitors into collaborators.
I have no idea what the secret sauce is because I don’t think it’s a secret. You have to be born with the minimum required capabilities and then you have to purposefully nurture them for your entire life while also letting chance play a role. Seek out fun, exploration, failure, friendships, idiosyncrasies. Focus and intentionality opens the field for good luck to play a role. People will help you and accelerate your goals because they believe or hope that you are more deserving than others. Hopefully you in turn, will do the same for those who come after you.
This is not a prescription for a good, happy, content, fulfilling, or healthy life either. Those things are pretty personal.
Just know that I’m rooting for you to be in the game and to play it well.
Some additional thoughts and reading:
“Mastery” by Robert Greene. It lays out how to amass skills, expertise, and insight over a lifetime so that you can be impactful, creativity, and independent.
Author, Mathematician, and Investor Nassim Taleb comments in his book Anti-Fragile, “Heroism and the respect it commands is a form of compensation by society for those who take risks for others. And entrepreneurship is a risky and heroic activity, necessary for growth or even the mere survival of the economy.” We should celebrate those who try and fail because their risks benefit all of us.
Albert Camus’ essay “The Myth of Sisyphus” examines the toil and torture of unending hard labor and concludes that life, despite the hardships, is still worth living. LINK to Essay
Stoic philosophers like Seneca, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius are also excellent to read. Lots of discussion on seeking out hardship and building yourself up over years to overcome challenges.
The Red Queen Hypothesis: is a hypothesis in evolutionary biology which proposes that species must constantly adapt, evolve, and proliferate in order to survive while pitted against ever-evolving opposing species. You have to run as fast as you can to stay in the same spot.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Queen_hypothesis
