“‘2) gave you a competitive edge over others”
OP, would you please explain what this is supposed to mean?
Sure. Here I was going by my own experience on the fringes of academia and journalism. In many other fields it might not apply at all.
In academia, a person who could speak knowledgeably about politics had a leg up when interviewing for a position or conversing at networking/social events.
And in the media, pre-internet, people had to depend a lot on their memory of past news stories in order to write current news stories and set them in context.