You're Not Lacking Effort—You're on the Wrong Track: Reinvent Yourself to Become Irreplaceable

Lately, side hustles have become an almost unavoidable topic whenever I catch up with friends.
One person says they're helping others polish resumes, another is taking on freelance work, and someone else has started a side account, hoping to earn a little pocket money by writing.

Everyone has realized that one main job is no longer enough: it's neither secure nor fulfilling.
But once you actually start, you discover that most side hustles are just more of the same: you're still selling your time.
A resume gets polished and leaves no trace; a project ends and resets to zero.
The cycle of trading time for money continues, even in a side hustle.

So many people jump into side hustles with anxiety, only to find themselves twice as exhausted.
How do we break out of this trap?

One day I came across a quote from Naval that hit the nail on the head:

"Become the best in the world at what you do. Keep redefining what you do until this is true."

Be the best in the world at what you do. If you can't, keep redefining what you do until that statement becomes true.

Most people's first reaction to this is:
Best in the world? How is that possible?
The world's best programmer? The world's best writer? That sounds hopeless.

We assume "best in the world" means beating everyone in a huge, generic field.
But Naval's point is exactly the opposite:

Don't compete with everyone. Redefine what you do.

If you're just "a person who writes code," you'll never beat millions of programmers worldwide.
But if you say you're "an engineer who understands both finance and distributed systems," you've narrowed the field.
Go further: "a distributed systems engineer who deeply understands risk assessment logic." That's a unique niche.

In this new definition, you're no longer one of millions of competitors. You're the only player in a track you created yourself.

So the key isn't fighting it out in a crowded field. It's continually redefining until you find that open space that belongs to you.

A Five-Step Method: How to Redefine Yourself

To keep this from becoming just another motivational quote, I tried to break Naval's idea down into an actionable method.
These five steps form a "redefinition path":

1. Find Your Specific Knowledge

Naval has a classic line: Specific knowledge is highly creative or technical knowledge that cannot be taught.
Specific knowledge is often something others can't replicate, yet you do it effortlessly.

How do you find it?
Observe: what feels like play to you but looks like work to others?

For me, writing is exactly that.
Many people find writing a two-thousand-word essay agonizing, but when I write, it feels like building with blocks: start with a story, add a counterintuitive twist, then fit in practical methods. When I finish, I even feel a bit of the joy of "debugging successfully."

That's a clue to my specific knowledge.

2. Keep Redefining Your Boundaries

If you define yourself only as "an engineer," you're competing with countless others.
If you define yourself as "a person who writes a public account," you're competing with countless writers.

But I began to realize I could redefine myself as:
"Someone who uses an engineer's reasoning power to write workplace growth articles that anyone can understand."

That's completely different.
Most people who write about workplace topics rely on narrative or motivational logic.
Most engineers don't explain their reasoning process to non-technical readers.
And I happen to be able to combine these two things.

That's the power of redefinition: you don't need to be first in a track someone else drew. You create your own track.

3. Amplify with Leverage

Finding specific knowledge isn't enough. You need to amplify it.
Naval talks about three kinds of leverage: capital, labor, and code and media.

Capital and labor require external conditions, but code and media are the strongest forms of leverage.
Write once, replicate infinitely.

Writing articles is a form of media leverage.
One article can be read, shared, and bookmarked by countless people.
The difference between that and chatting with one person in a café is that the former is a reusable asset, while the latter vanishes with the wind.

Playing with Claude Code to build proofs of concept has also given me a taste of leverage.
For example, I tried making a resume signal comparison tool. Even though it was just a rough prototype, it can be used infinitely.
That's completely different from helping one person polish a resume by hand: the former can scale, while the latter only consumes you repeatedly.

4. Long-Term Games and Reputation Compounding

Having work isn't enough. You need it to accumulate trust.
Naval says: Play long-term games with long-term people.

Another meaning of writing is that it slowly builds my reputation.
Some people reach out to chat because of an article. Others learn what I've done through my writing.
These things don't monetize immediately, but over the long term, they become trust assets.

Unlike the cycle of "selling time" in side hustles, reputation compounds.
The more you persist, the more you're remembered by long-term people.

5. Continuously Iterate on Your Definition

Redefinition isn't a one-time act. It's a process.
Today I might define myself as "an engineer who writes workplace articles."
Tomorrow it might be "someone who can write scripts for writing."
The day after, "someone who can productize reasoning processes with AI tools."

Each iteration brings you closer to uniqueness.
Eventually, at some point, you'll discover:
In this dimension, I truly am the best in the world.

My Two "Productization" Experiments

Back to myself.
Writing exploration
At first, I tried to apply so-called "viral formulas," but the results felt stiff and unnatural.
Later I understood: what I needed to distill wasn't someone else's template, but my own "writing methodology"—that unique reasoning style and narrative habit that gradually turns scattered thoughts into words.

When this methodology internalized into a stable structure, writing changed.
It was no longer reinventing the wheel each time, but adding increments on top of existing assets.

Technical exploration
On the technical side, I went through a similar process.
Many ideas used to stay only in my head, or at most became a rough sketch. Then I started experimenting with Claude Code, even if it was just a crude proof of concept.

For example, I built a small resume signal comparison tool: upload two resumes, and it automatically generates a difference chart across "impact, scope, risk, and collaboration." It's not perfect, and the interface is bare-bones, but it gave me my first taste of what it feels like to turn an idea into something real quickly—and to have it be reusable.

That's when I understood: writing and coding are actually similar.
When you can transform inspiration into a reusable form, it shifts from one-time consumption to an accumulating asset. These small experiments gave me my first real sense of the power in Naval's words.
I don't need to fight desperately to be first among engineers or writers.
Instead, through continuous redefinition, I can combine "engineering thinking + writing expression + workplace insight + cross-cultural experience + hand-drawn illustration" into a unique intersection.

In that definition, I am almost the only one.

Uniqueness Beats First Place

"Become the best in the world" sounds like an impossible task.
But Naval's answer is: don't fight desperately in someone else's track. Keep redefining until you become the only one in your own definition.

So the real question isn't "Can I become number one in the world?"
It's "Can I find a redefinition that makes me irreplaceable in that field?"

This is what I've been thinking about and practicing lately.
The road is still long, but I can already see a faint glimmer in the distance. That's enough to keep me going.