The competitive landscape has changed, and young people need to adapt
Some unspoken lessons that I've picked up through experience
I’ve spent the first few years of my adult life trying to understand the systems that determine how people find and secure opportunities. The frameworks we’re taught to use in elementary school, high school, and even college seem to break down in the real world.
Traditional advice operates on assumptions about scarcity, signalling, and selection mechanisms that no longer hold. This has created a generation of young people facing repeated rejection, wondering whether something is wrong with them or if they’ve entered adulthood at a time when the world doesn’t need them.
The generational knowledge gap is real: previous generations’ frameworks for securing opportunities don’t translate to current competition dynamics. Every major opportunity in life has become more competitive, from university admissions to job applications and immigration visas. Even informal opportunities like research positions or startup roles now require competitive positioning.
The result: constant social pressure to do better, to be more competitive in all aspects of our lives. People have adapted to this, almost too well. Goodhart’s law is in full effect.
Contemporary systems of human competition are analogous to games in game theory—described best as adversarial systems where outcomes depend on not just your move, but everyone’s.
Becoming competent
What does meritocracy actually mean? We usually interpret it as ‘select the most qualified person.’ But what does it mean to be qualified? Does it mean you’ve worked harder than everyone else? Does it mean you’re the least risky option? Or does it simply mean the decision-maker prefers to give the opportunity to you?
We often misinterpret ‘merit’ as being about what we have done to earn the right to be chosen. In practice, it’s better to define merit by the needs and incentives of the gatekeeper (person(s) doing the selection).
This is why it sometimes feels like less competent people are chosen over us in arenas like the job market, dating, or startup funding. We fixate on formal measures of competency, assuming they align with the game’s incentives, but they often fall short.
A good, modern example is the diminishing value of college degrees. Over the past 50 years, a degree has shifted from being a high-signal indicator of fitness to merely a prerequisite for entry. Although the work required to earn the degree hasn’t changed, its leverage has plummeted. The credential has become misaligned with the actual incentive of the game: hiring someone with a high probability of doing the job well.
Contextual Competency
Competency is highly context-sensitive; it must be aligned with the incentives of the game you’re playing.
The challenge is that sometimes incentives are difficult to read or not communicated at all. Incentives are somewhat structured in games like the job search, applying for research grants, university admissions, and scholarships. Even in these games, there are hidden policies and incentives at play, often outweighing the stated incentives.
In other sorts of games, incentives are not as clear, like writing a cold email, asking someone out, or convincing someone to mentor you. Although these games are harder, the reward for success is often much higher. It’s very important you participate in these kinds of games.
Know your gatekeeper
There are usually only 1-2 people who make the decision on whether to select you for an opportunity: a university admissions officer reviewing your file, a hiring manager screening candidates, or an immigration official evaluating your visa petition.
Knowing who this person is and the incentives they have to select/reject you is critical to building your competencies.
MVP (Minimum Viable Persona)
To become competent in your domain, you need to understand deeply what your MVP (minimum viable persona) is. A good way to think about this is to ask yourself, “if I were [insert gatekeeper], who would be the least competent person (that I could still justifiably give this opportunity to)?”
Building for the long term
The MVP is not meant to be competitive but rather a starting point. Building for the long term means to make decisions and take actions that are in your control to give yourself a competitive advantage. This competitive advantage should ideally be difficult to replicate in the short term, and lean into your inherent unfair advantages. These are the kinds of competencies that set you apart in most competitive environments.
Some examples of actions:
Practicing competitive programming/math
Building a large professional network
Becoming fluent in a language
Creating a relationship with a good mentor
Developing good study habits
Some examples of decisions:
Choosing a target school for your desired career, or not going to school at all
Choosing roles that prioritize [learning | prestige | pay] depending on your goals
Moving to a city with a high concentration of talent as opposed to one you’re more comfortable in
Appeal to incentive structures
If I were to suggest focusing on anything in your effort to seek opportunities, it is this step. This is the most critical gap to close, as it is the literal gap between you and the opportunity you seek.
What is an incentive structure?
Incentive structures are the dynamic systems that emerge from the interplay between environmental constraints (such as budgets, laws, and organizational policies) and the underlying motivations of all stakeholders.
Almost any result you get out of life comes from appealing to some sort of incentive structure, whether you realize it or not. Games like relationships, dating, getting on a sports team, landing a research position, and buying a car are all dictated by silent incentives at play for all sides.
In simpler terms, the incentive structure is the reason(s) that your gatekeeper has to choose you for the opportunity, as opposed to someone else, or no one else. Not selecting someone is also a choice.
Some examples of incentive structures to appeal to are:
Internships: Main incentive structure for the company is return offers, potential tax credits, and access to early talent = competitive advantage.
Graduate school: Admissions committee will favour applicants that have high potential for achievement and can contribute to school reputation + potential future funding.
Immigration application: prioritizing applicants that best fit current goals for immigration policy, high likelihood of integration, high likelihood of positive economic impact compared to natural-born citizens.
Application for a research grant: grant committee will prioritize research that aligns with their goals and demonstrates a strong potential for breakthrough.
Seeking a mentor: A successful person will mentor someone who demonstrates high potential for success and is likely to positively reflect on the mentor’s reputation and network.
Investment pitch: Investors will prioritize startups/projects that address a significant market need, have a clear path to profitability, and align with the investor’s portfolio strategy.
Publishing a book: A publisher will acquire manuscripts they believe have a high potential for commercial success (sales) and/or critical acclaim (prestige).
Information Asymmetry and Adversarial Games
To master incentive structures, you must recognize that every competitive opportunity is defined by two forces: Information Asymmetry and Adversarial Dynamics.
Information Asymmetry
In any selection process, the gatekeeper holds a “hidden checklist” of internal priorities, while you are a “black box” to them. They can only gauge your potential through proxies called signals.
The gap exists because:
The Gatekeeper’s Risk: They fear selecting someone who looks good on paper but fails in practice.
The Seeker’s Legibility: You know your value, but you are likely presenting it in a way that is hard for the gatekeeper to verify.
To close this gap, you must use first principles to determine the costly signal. A costly signal is a piece of evidence that is so difficult to produce that a low-competency person cannot fake it.
Research Opportunity: Good grades are a standard signal. A self-directed literature review or a GitHub repository containing a replica of the PI’s latest experiment is a costly signal.
Co-founder Search: A “great idea” is a standard signal. An MVP (Minimum Viable Product) with 100 paying users or a history of building and shipping projects together is a costly signal.
University Admissions: A standard essay is expected. A national-level award or a niche, high-impact community project is costly.
The Adversarial Nature of the Game
You are not just playing against the requirements; you are playing against the Default-No. For a gatekeeper, “No” is the safest choice. It costs nothing and carries zero risk. “Yes” puts their reputation and resources on the line.
Guidelines for the Adversarial Game:
Add Risk to the “No”: Position yourself so the gatekeeper feels they are losing a significant opportunity by rejecting you. If you are a potential co-founder who already has the technical infrastructure built, the other person loses months of progress by saying “No” to you.
Identify the Proxy: Gatekeepers rarely measure what they actually want; they measure a proxy.
Example: A Principal Investigator (PI) doesn’t just want a “smart student”; they want “low-maintenance productivity.” They use your technical skills as a proxy for how much time they’ll have to spend training you.
Seek to align your Incentives with the Gatekeeper: Rather than forcing judgement in your favour, try to align the incentives of the gatekeeper with your incentives so that your success and their success are aligned. If you’re truly a good option and the gatekeeper is rewarded for their good judgement, this alignment occurs naturally.
How can I build trust?
In these kinds of games, much of trust is often downstream from reputation. Cultivate a good reputation and make it easily verifiable.
Assuming you’ve done well to guard your reputation, you can help build trust by:
Leveraging social proof: This is classic negotiation advice for a reason. Use warm introductions, referrals, personal connections, publicity, and virality as powerful advantages to showcase good character.
Proof of stake: Some ways of showing you have a vested interest are better than others. If you can leverage experience, showcase it front and center. If you possess rare or exclusive achievements, center your strategy around them.
Searching for opportunities
What do you want?
This step seems obvious but is incredibly easy to skip when in the heat of things. Taking time to understand what kind of position you’d like to see yourself in makes the following steps much easier. A key theme of this article is tailoring and targeting people, positions, politics, and incentives. Having a clear understanding of who and what you want to become is a prerequisite to playing the game well.
That being said, it can actually be really hard to get a good understanding of what kind of opportunities you should focus your time and energy on. Some factors to consider are attainability, alignment with goals, prestige/optics, upward mobility, etc.
There are some good heuristics you can use to take shortcuts to identify good opportunities for yourself. You can use role models as proxies for the type of pathway you should take. You can also have a final goal in mind and work backwards from there, using other people as a reference to see if those steps are realistic. Or, you can just be delusional.
Cold outreach (don’t be annoying)
Cold outreach is often portrayed as a shortcut to competitive opportunities, especially in games like the job market, research opportunities, fellowships, and other types of competitive games where the gatekeeper is public and can be contacted easily.
As with all shortcuts, however, over time the economics become more efficient, and over the past few years this method has kind of been patched—but only if you do it in the conventional way.
You should try your best to structure your cold outreach to appeal to incentive structures, so that when your name pops up in the gatekeeper’s inbox, it’s seen as a potential asset rather than a burden.
Reach out to people that you can truly impress and help; this reduces decision fatigue.
Have a clear ask in your communication to help the reader determine exactly what they’d be committing to you if they choose to fulfill said ask.
De-risk the fulfillment process; the gatekeeper asks: “If I were to help this person out, how much do I stand to lose?” You want to minimize this loss.
Key themes of this article
Focus on First Principles: Analyze the incentive structure. Every gatekeeper has a specific problem. Solve that problem to become the obvious choice.
Close the Information Gap: Open the “black box” of your profile. Provide verifiable value immediately.
Prioritize Legibility: Excellence requires visibility. Use costly signals and high-fidelity proof. Make your competence impossible to ignore.
Target the Persona: Humans make the final decision. Systems are usually secondary. Study the individual making the choice. Identify their anxieties and personal wins.
Eliminate Friction: Rejection is the default state. Remove extra clicks and confusing sentences. Design the “Yes” as the path of least resistance.
Apply Strategic Intuition: Incentive structures provide a map when information is missing. Use these structures to make accurate predictions.
This might break as well
Selection processes change. Human behaviour shifts over time. These principles reflect current and historical patterns.
The nature of competitive games will transform over the next decade. Expect drastic shifts in one, five, and ten years. Some ideas in this article will become obsolete. Others will eventually become counterproductive.
“This might break” refers to the instability of strategy. Tactics have expiration dates. Strategies fail as more people adopt them.
Your primary task is to seek new information. Apply first principles to every situation. Use your own judgment to navigate new environments. This remains the only timeless framework.
More of me on saadkhalid.com
Congratulations on a strong essay, Saad. Thoughtful, clear, and very timely. The emphasis on incentives and long-term positioning resonates deeply, especially when you look at how investing and markets actually work. Well done.