A personal moat is a set of unique and accumulating competitive advantages in the context of your career.

Hard to learn and hard to do (but perhaps easier for you)

Impossible without rare and/or valuable skills

Unique to your own talents & interests

Legible, in the sense that your expertise should be easy to describe, easy to share, and makes people want to do both for you

Ask others: What’s something that’s easy for me to do but hard for others? What's something I have that’s very difficult for people to reverse engineer?

Another concept is Ikigai: the intersection of what you love, what you’re good at, and what the world needs.

It’s important to know that moats change over time as conditions change.

Here's a quick litmus test: If there is a solid Quora post with step by step instructions on how to do something, or if thousands of people have done it, then it’s likely not a durable or a unique personal moat. If there’s a playbook for it, then how defensible is it?

Some other hacks to build moats include picking something that isn’t big now, but will be in the future (e.g. crypto in 2016), something that relies on exclusive relationships that you can access (e.g. enterprise healthcare, access to LPs), or something that is legibly impressive or valuable but has no playbook.

It could be a combination of expertise, relationships, sensibilities, and skills that you’ve accumulated over the years.

Should you specialize or generalize? Either could work, but you have to actually be good at something. That’s a key concept.

You want to be at least great at one thing, and then apply that lens or skill to other categories.

In conclusion, discover what’s easy for you but hard for others, then get so good they can’t ignore you, and then leverage that to accrue social and financial capital. Don’t skip steps 1 & 2.