Can someone become like you now Guy Raz asked Marques Brownlee?
It’s different today. “I’ve noticed that in polls of younger people their dream jobs used to be firefighter or movie star, but they all say YouTuber now”, said Marques, “this is fascinating to me because when I started that did not exist.”
If something is legible it’s something to compete on. But illegible things – becoming a YouTuber before it was a thing – make the competition harder.
Legible means playing according to the rules of the game. Illegible means making up the rules as you go. “I just wanted to make the kind of videos I liked to watch,” Marques notes. Illegible also means there’s time to find your rules. Brownlee spent years making videos. He admits that the early ones are hard to watch because they’re so bad. That’s fine!
With value comes competition, and the market mechanism whirls to life. “Your margin,” Bezos believed, “is my opportunity”. Alpha erodes.
Except in some places like the new, the foreign, the unaccounted, the unfavorable, the silly, and so on. Not every new thing ‘works out’ but every new thing has less competition.
The Waiter's Pad 