Personal Competitive Advantages

As an extension of the posts on learning to sell and life entrepreneurship, I think it is also important to realize that something as simple as competitive advantage can be scaled to the personal level as well.

On a small scale, each person is their own business. Your work is your product. Your competition is anyone who does the same type of job or work that you do. You must examine yourself and know your strengths and weaknesses, just like a business would. You may not be able to sell as well as someone else or you may not have as many connections as another person but if you're a better researcher than both of them then you tailor your approach from that angle. You would succeed by doing better targeted research to find the clients who are most compatible and then you don't need to talk to as many people or cast as wide a net as the others.

Individuals in the same line of work still possess many different strengths and weaknesses. Those that succeed are the ones who take better advantage of their strengths and do a better job adapting their "competitive advantages" to the job at hand.