I found this article difficult since "personal moat" is used as a target rather than as the side effect of a behavior.
My experience here is limited of course to engineers and academics, generally technical people I've known over the years as they have grown professionally. The ones who have "moats" are the same people whose career choices have been deliberate rather than opportunistic.
When I meet people who are deliberate in the direction they are going[1], they invest more in the direction. So if someone is looking to become a great manager they seek out companies with good managers and try to learn from them.
As I interviewed people at Google, when I asked "Why Google?" and they responded "I've always wanted to work at Google." I would follow up with, "Okay, but why?" There were two general kinds of answers here, one was "because Google right?" and the other was "Google is investing in X which is something I'm interested in and I believe I can help with that." Opportunistic vs deliberate.
The people I've known that got really stuck were ones who found themselves in a "really sweet gig" which was not to hard, paid well, and over time it became harder to find people who could do it.
One engineer I know spent 25 years being "the Fax guy." He knew more about FAX, the history, the protocols, the problems in implementing it, etc than I will ever know. But it wasn't about how FAX worked, it was about knowing what people paid other people to work on when it came to FAX. And then FAX became a non-thing and he had no skills that any number of new college grads had. What he could have done was learn about digital signal processing and how you process signals to extract data in noisy environments. That has pretty universal application, but he wasn't working on FAX stuff because he liked FAX, or because he found the technology behind it interesting. It was just "in demand", until it wasn't.
So he had a great "personal moat" but he was also barrelling along toward being obsolete.
As a result I am not sure I can take the article too literally. Becoming a specialist is one thing, but there is risk that the specialization will become moot. You're moat doesn't do you any good if nobody needs your specialty.
[1] Which does not imply that they have tunnel vision with respect to other paths, just that they have an internal stack of values and reasoning that guides them in a particular direction.
My experience here is limited of course to engineers and academics, generally technical people I've known over the years as they have grown professionally. The ones who have "moats" are the same people whose career choices have been deliberate rather than opportunistic.
When I meet people who are deliberate in the direction they are going[1], they invest more in the direction. So if someone is looking to become a great manager they seek out companies with good managers and try to learn from them.
As I interviewed people at Google, when I asked "Why Google?" and they responded "I've always wanted to work at Google." I would follow up with, "Okay, but why?" There were two general kinds of answers here, one was "because Google right?" and the other was "Google is investing in X which is something I'm interested in and I believe I can help with that." Opportunistic vs deliberate.
The people I've known that got really stuck were ones who found themselves in a "really sweet gig" which was not to hard, paid well, and over time it became harder to find people who could do it.
One engineer I know spent 25 years being "the Fax guy." He knew more about FAX, the history, the protocols, the problems in implementing it, etc than I will ever know. But it wasn't about how FAX worked, it was about knowing what people paid other people to work on when it came to FAX. And then FAX became a non-thing and he had no skills that any number of new college grads had. What he could have done was learn about digital signal processing and how you process signals to extract data in noisy environments. That has pretty universal application, but he wasn't working on FAX stuff because he liked FAX, or because he found the technology behind it interesting. It was just "in demand", until it wasn't.
So he had a great "personal moat" but he was also barrelling along toward being obsolete.
As a result I am not sure I can take the article too literally. Becoming a specialist is one thing, but there is risk that the specialization will become moot. You're moat doesn't do you any good if nobody needs your specialty.
[1] Which does not imply that they have tunnel vision with respect to other paths, just that they have an internal stack of values and reasoning that guides them in a particular direction.