Edge: Turning Adversity into Advantage

I’ve studied how “soft” factors*—such as personality, the extent to which you are seen as trustworthy, passionate, or committed, and the way you interact with people—rather than objective data, drive the decisions and outcomes of individuals and firms.

You have to assume that the system is not going to change. But even if it does, why should you wait around for it? You can’t be paralyzed by this inequity. You can’t be afraid to confront the system as it is.

The absence of the very constraints that incubators set out to help start-ups avoid prevents their ability to enrich and create value.

The narrative and the numbers concept gives us a way to test our intuition about what might appear to fit but in fact is contradictory—in other words, it helps us fine-tune our gut feel about things that don’t seem quite right.

Creating an edge starts with pinpointing your basic goods and defining your circle of competence, and operating inside that perimeter.

The high-concept pitch, the two-sentence pitch, and the extended pitch.

Overpreparation deprives us of the ability to bob and weave—to dynamically regulate and calibrate.

Once we start to focus on the extent to which people perceive us to provide value, we begin to minimize (and sometimes even forget about) actually providing value. We stop, to some degree, trying to enrich ourselves.

Sometimes developing your basic goods and making the most effective use of them is best accomplished when you can go beyond the crowd and identify something distinctive on your own—that’s when really special things can happen.