For me this is the essence and most important takeaway. And I can’t marvel at our beginners luck in 2009-2010, when most of us at VP started off as active investors. Call it beginners Luck - We started off with relatively the most inefficient market segment - Micro and Small size businesses - in Indian Markets.
In the Indian Market Context - obviously Top 200, Top 500 Businesses are were the markets are more efficient - at least in information/analysis. Information was much more readily available about these well-discovered businesses; 1000s of analysts are following them; the businesses themselves followed certain standards for information dissemination through websites, annual reports, investor presentations and conference calls.
Beginners Luck came from having folks like Ayush and Hitesh who had familiarity (family/peers) with the inordinate pay-offs from a non-consensus call in small.micro caps should the call prove right. Those were real bear markets - they had dozens of ideas - which you couldn’t shake off - 30%+ growers, 25-30% RoC, available 5-6 PE - screaming bargains even novices like us could make out.
_No one wanted to invest then - so that itself was a non-consensus call_ 
And then came the important part - since no one was buying - some of us passionate deep-divers - had time sometimes like 6 months to research a business - to separate the wheat from the chaff - why invest here and not there. The hard work scuttlebutt in businesses like Mayur, Astral started, collecting lot of data and meeting Management - again using some skill in business analysis.
I still remember for 6 months I would go around meeting any Fund Manager/Analyst - just to know where we are going wrong - challenging anyone “show me another small business with similar potential, world-class customers, growing at similar rates, with these kind of returns” - and no one would bat an eyelid. The best response I would get is - "Donald, we can’t really look/invest meaningfully in a business till it is at least 500 Cr Sales, or 50 Crs in Profits!! By then Mayur in 2011 had in 3 years grown from ~100 CR Sales, 6 Cr Profits in 2009 to ~250 Cr Sales 25 Cr Profits - the business transition was visible.
But folks like us who had gone in 2009/10 and spent 6-7 hours in the factory, met Management, interacted with workers, talked to distributors like Stanley - clearly had that Information and Analysis edge - by dint of hard work and skill.
We were quite alive to a few edges that we had bumbled along towards, naturally (courtesy generous mentor @janak Janak Merchant) - as we found us saying boss, there is a method to this madness perhaps - and captured that essence in this write-up of Sep 12 The 3 Investor Edges
Today the scenario is probably that small and micro caps segment has a much wider following/bevy of investors. Information dissemination is also much better and more efficient - reaches many more folks far more efficiently - why we at VP also play a role in more efficient info dissemination 
for micro and small businesses.
So I like to hazard that Information Edge is available only to the hardest slogger today. And that’s not really a sustainable edge - unless backed up by high skill. How much harder can you keep slogging - you are bound to lose a fighting battle against information efficiency!
The rest like you and me - who have now access to information at say more or less the same time - have to rely more on building our Skill Edge - which I again hazard to say will endure - only if we can remain Continuous Learners. Skill in learning to ask the right questions, progressively every year (for a business we are familiar with) - skill in absorbing and extracting pertinent industry/competitive positioning/strategy (key for Valuations) - over 2-3 years these become like domain skills. And then Refinement for Assessing superior Business Quality, Superior Management Quality - one can keep wondering and keep learning - and keep getting more skilled. As more folks get more skilled here - we are needing to build in more refined skills in Understanding Markets/Investor Behaviour.
HM reflects it’s not easy for any one person to consistently hold views that are different from the consensus and closer to being correct** - That is my second biggest takeaway!!
Since everyone can’t get equally skilled in everything, it pays off hugely to have folks around us who are diversely-skilled. Again at VP we had Beginners Luck in attracting that set of multi-talented, diversely-skilled folks that know and play their different roles, energetically. Again, luckily we were aware/acknowledged that - some method in the madness - that seemed to be working for us. Assorted-Skills Team. Needless to say (with @Sanjay_Bakshi Prof Bakshi’s nudging/generosity) - we did get to capture this again in this Why Team VP Works presentation at FLAME in 2015.
The beauty is - the more skilled Team VP becomes, the more varied specialist skills Team VP starts attracting!!