Edge Turning adversity into advantage by Laura Huang
13 Edge Principles
Hard work should speak for itself, but it doesn’t.
It’s not about giving it your all. Your basic goods help you get it all.
To use your basic goods in distinct ways, go where others don’t.
Embrace constraints. Constraints provide opportunities.
Your powers of discernment come from trusting your intuition and your experiences.
Before people will let you in, they need to be delighted.
Don’t over plan. Instead, aim for flexibility and opportunities to delight.
Stay authentic and embrace how delight occurs in situ.
‘Being yourself’ entails guiding others to all the glorious versions of yourself.
Know how others see you, so you can redirect them to how they should see you.
Guide others to what is within you by recognizing what is around you.
It’s not where you’ve been. It’s where you’re going. Guide how others see your trajectory.
Turn adversity into the edge.
The first part of the book is ‘Enrich’.The foundation of your edge is your ability to provide value to enrich those around you. The second part is ‘delight’. The third part is the ‘guide’.
https://www.nber.org/digest/nov15/growing-importance-social-skills-labor-market
There is a premium on those who are skilled in coordination, negotiation, persuasion, and social perceptiveness. These types of skills have the most potential to expose us to bias. But they also give us the most opportunities to turn inherent disadvantages into an edge.
“A winner is a loser who tried one more time. The most certain way to succeed is to just try one more time.”
You have to assume that the system is not going to change. When you are in the system, you need to take charge of your own outcomes. When you create an edge with your hard work, you create tailwinds that help you capitalize on your hard work more effectively. Headwinds are the biases and disadvantages that have the opposite effect, things that make it difficult for us or others to get ahead. Turn your headwinds into tailwinds.
When you have an edge, effort, and hard work fuel the engine more efficiently. Edge is about knowing how, when, and where to put in the effort and hard work.
‘Simplicity is the end result of long, hard work, not the starting point” - Frederick Maitland
Edge has two components:
You bring value. You enrich what would otherwise be.
Others think so too.
You bring value, you enrich and others believe you bring value and enrich.
Ask yourself this: When people are interacting with you or your organization, what is the most basic thing they expect you to deliver in order for them to allow you to continue up the ladder of influence.
Knowing your weakness and your basic good helps you figure out where you can create an edge.
When you have an idea, you also need to know the domains of the core components. (I have a wonderful idea, but can you find a programmer who can help me with it” - this won’t work).
“To see things in the seed, that is Genius” - Lao Tu.
Different isn't always better, but better is always different.
To use your basic goods in distinct ways, go where others don’t.
Don’t follow the money, follow worth. This thinking applies to us as individuals too. We have a tendency to let others dictate our constraints, shackling us, and preventing us from thinking beyond those constraints. We focus on our weaknesses, the skills that we don’t have.
When people apply for jobs more often than not, they determine that they are not qualified for their positions. So they never bother applying, even when they have identified those jobs as ones they would absolutely love.
The conventional notion that we tend to ‘jump to conclusions’ more precisely stated, is that we tend to ‘jump to solutions’. That is what we learn in school. To avoid jumping to solutions, formulating problems has to be more deliberate and specifically, deliberated through two distinct phases: first, framing and identifying the symptoms and only after that. Formulating problems.
Lean into constraints. Enrich by accepting and embracing constraints, rather than trying to duck or dodge them. Don’t let the constraints that others create prevent you from identifying the problem for you and hence the solution for you. Allowing constraints to help you enrich. Use them in your favor. When you treat constraints differently than others, you will have the edge. Constraints can be a benefit and source to be leveraged to enrich- so much so that not having them can also create problems, resulting in an even lesser chance of enriching and providing value.
As per Albert Bartlet, “the greatest flaw of man is not being able to fathom the exponential function’. We tend to think linearly and are seldom able to conceive a better way - the exponential function. Linear thinking is rule-based, superficial, logical, and easy to replicate. When you think linearly, you underestimate what is actually possible. When you start thinking exponentially, in a way that cultivates your own personal experiences plus, it becomes one of the most powerful ways to home and practice enriching.
Non-incremental, exponential thinking often occurs when we ‘flip the formula’. When we invert, our upend or turn something upside down, it allows us to identify and remove obstacles to success.
People are uncomfortable with what researchers call cognitive dissonance - when two things, be they beliefs, ideas, or values, feel contradictory. Human beings are hardwired to not notice things like inconsistencies between narrative and the surrounding numbers. They change part of their cognition to eliminate the discomfort of cognitive dissonance by ignoring things that seem amiss and exaggerating the positives.
But if we engage in a conscious effort to seek out incongruities, we create opportunities to enrich. Learn to notice what’s not there and to trust in what is there. Knowing the value of being and trusting in your own perspective is the foundation of your edge. Then you can show others how you enrich.
Before making an important phone call, take time to jot down two or three bullet points. By identifying the two or three things that are most critical to the conversation or that the other person wants an answer or resolution to, you’ll be able to steer the conversation in the right direction.
Your powers of discernment come from trusting your intuition and your experience.
Delight - something that affords gratification. At the crux of delight is a component that most people miss” surprise. Delight is in the unexpected.
The high-concept pitch, the two-sentence pitch, and the extended pitch. Those are the prototypes that I tell them to think of and to try to assess. The high-concept pitch is really something that allows you to distill your point into three or four well-placed poignant words. It delivers all the information that your target audience will initially need, in a quick ‘shock;.
What is your two-sentence pitch? There could be multiple such things - one for a supplier, one for a potential customer, one for a potential investor, and so on. What are your pitches and whom are you targeting?
“For (target audience) who (have a need), the (product name) is a (product category) that offers (a key benefit). Unlike (competitors), we (are different in a keyway).
The extended pitch is longer than two-sentence but shorter than one minute.
Don’t over plan. Instead, aim for flexibility and opportunities to delight.
Delight is about feeling special, and the additional effort or money that you are willing to put because of it. How do you recognize something magical and delightful? Seek out people, products, and situations that you yourself see as delightful and consciously try to pinpoint what makes them delightful to you. The more you do so, the more it helps you refine your own sense of delight and your own ability to delight. We all have the capacity to enrich. But when you are able to delight, that is when the real magic happens.
Stay authentic and embrace how delight occurs in situ.
“ you never realize how much of your background is sewn into the lining of your clothes ‘ - Tom Wolfe.
Guide - to direct, to set, to influence the course of action.
We need to guide because the levers that enable success are often outside our control. And those who pull the levers are making judgments and decisions based on their perceptions of our competence and character. We cannot demand that others pull the levers, but it’s within our power to direct how they pull down the levers. We have the ability to guide the course rather than settle for the course of action that others decide for us.
Self-awareness is a sense of who we are, what we value, and what our inherent strengths are. When we say ‘self-awareness’, we mean knowledge of who we are internally. We need to own who we are and the context - what is within us and what is around us need to complement each other in order for us to be successful.
We have the power to guide how we position ourselves to others and hence how others perceive us - but first, we need to understand our ‘self’: the perceptions we have of ourselves, and how we internalize others’ perceptions. Only then can we take an active role in guiding and reconciling the voices, opinions, and perceptions of clothes vis-a-vis who we know ourselves to be.
The path forward - the path to creating an edge for oneself - is therefore about acknowledging and receiving the perceptions of others, while simultaneously empowering yourself not to embrace and adopt those views. You can accept the perceptions of others so that you can consciously address them and confront them - but without embracing and internalizing them.
How do we get a strong sense of ourselves? First, compare yourself with yourself, not with others. Second, remember that life rhymes. Look out for what rhymes in your life - the situations that seem to repeat themselves, the similarities in both your success and your obstacles. Third, as you begin to pick up on these patterns, don’t go for absolutes, but or directionality. (what are wrong and right directions).
If you go for directionality, you will be more likely to avoid striving for goals that don’t leverage your strengths, and that makes it harder for you to create unfair advantages.
Self-awareness is like a diamond, sparkling differently from every angle. Cultivating your edge is about knowing each of your own facets and knowing how they will shine to those who are looking. There isn’t one singular version of oneself. There may be flaws and you may have disadvantages, but you have a diamond. You can guide how your diamond is perceived, you can delight and differentiate, and you have the power to enrich.
“People hear me through their eyes first’ - by Anonymous author.
To guide and redirect, use the biases and stereotypes that others have of you in your favor. Guide them to the attributions that you want them to make. Know how others see you, so you can redirect them to how they should see you.
“The goal is to invest in passionate entrepreneurs. That’s it, end of the story,. Passion’ - Mark Suster (VC). Guiding others does not have to be arduous or painful, nor does it have to be an act that takes you out of your own comfort zone. It can be a simple by-product and an organic extension of your surroundings.
Guiding others to what is within you by recognizing what is around you.
Being able to clearly communicate your trajectory allows you to guide people in such a way that they can comprehend who you are in a coherent and meaningful way. Some may call it a personal narrative, but it is more than that. A narrative provides an anecdote, morale, a quick lesson like what you’d get from one of Aesop's fables. A trajectory paints a richer picture of where you are and where you have come from - who you are as a person and what others can expect of you.
It is not where you have been. It is where you are going. Guide how others see your trajectory.
You are always one decision away from a totally different life” anonymous.
Effort reinforces your edge. It is the mental toughness that underlines all of this and that toughness provides an inoculation against the disappointment that we all will inevitably face because we remain at the mercy of the perceptions of others. It reminds us that at the end of the day, it is not what others think it is what you think. You have to know how you enrich., You have to delight yourself and others. And you have to trust in yourself as your guide.
Enrich, delight, guide, and effort. Turn adversity into an advantage - turn adversity into our edge.
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