The #1 Fastest Method to Make Your Work Loved & Respected — A Guide
Don’t compete to make your mark on the world.
One morning when I entered the classroom for a web design lecture, our teacher was hunched over his computer with a focused look. As class began, the teacher told us:
“Today, I’d like to start with something different. I want to show you a video, and while watching I want you to think about why I would show you this.”
This was the video:
As the video closed, the class sat silent. Either thinking hard or completely disinterested as with any bunch of students early in the morning. The teacher got up from his chair and pointed at the whiteboard projection.
“Other than finding this audition so darn impressive, I wanted to show you this video for one reason. This guy disregarded the notion that being an artist meant that you had to sing or bring a guitar. I found out the public opinion of him that many thought he was cheating, but he didn’t care. He did his thing and he flourished. He’s different.”
The room still quiet, he continued:
“This is what I want you to be. The clichés of web design have been done to death, even though it’s a medium with many creative possibilities. I want you to think outside the box and keep this in mind as you make each decision about your website. Don’t be better, be different.”
The Case For Being Different (& How It’ll Get You What You Want)
The funny thing was, we were far too poorly equipped skill-wise to execute on his advice.
We barely knew how to align contents to look symmetrical or how to integrate Java script. But his words stuck with me all the same.
It stuck with me because it’s true in so much of life:
- Business A & B fight over having the lowest price. Business C focuses on delivering unique & immense value to the customer and wins out.
- Athlete A & B trains hard every day by the book. Athlete C comes up with a new, more effective technique and comes in first place.
- Author A & B writes a book rehashing old clichés and platitudes to continue making a buck. Author C challenges the established narrative and publishes a breakout book and changes the way we see the world.
The reason this is the #1 method to success is because competing to be better is a bottomless game.
Achieving differentiation takes time but it does have endpoints you can reach, whereas being better is a perpetual race. Just like the saying “there will always be someone faster, richer, smarter and better looking than you”.
Of course, you cannot just be different.
Being unique from the grey mass has to come with an inherent benefit. If the general public didn’t find Sam Perry’s looping artistry a breath of fresh air, he would have been eliminated and forgotten (he won the competition).
The only way to know if you’re being different in a beneficial way is to put it to the test.
If you succeed, you will pivot yourself to a category of one. Forget cutting yourself a modest slice — with this method you’ll have the whole cake, pie, and whatever other metaphorical desserts you desire. I’ll show you how below.
Ready? Let’s go.
The Blueprint → How to Take The (Whole) Cake with Differentiation
To be beneficially different, you have to identify what makes the current reality of your craft what it is.
The clearest example of this is in business. If you want to gain beneficial differentiation and rise above the businesses competing on the same level, you have to innovate on one or more points:
- Distribution
- Customer support
- Marketing
- Target demographic
- Location
(Etc.)
An outstanding example of this is gaming giant King.
Gaming is widely known for being a young man’s sport, particularly teenage and young adult men.
King gazed beyond that horizon and looked toward who else they could serve a gaming experience.
They created the series Candy Crush Saga, introducing the readily available niche of mobile gaming to mainly women age 30+. Mobile gaming only requires what most people in developing countries already have — a smartphone.
They dismantled the norm of “three-monitor, $3000 gaming setups in dimly lit man caves, with a mini-fridge full of energy drinks on the side”.
Gaming became something for everyone. Which is why literally everyone and their grandmother played it.
They achieved beneficial differentiation by innovating on target demographic and experience, among other points.
Let me give you an example from personal experience.
When I decided that I wanted to start a YouTube channel, I chose a niche that had a fairly high bar to entry. But I knew that this wouldn’t be enough.
I broke down the niche and analyzed each component, researching what made it successful, its clichés, what people had grown tired of, and what they wanted to see more of.
I then took that data and forged it into a content plan that would set me apart in a (hopefully) beneficial way.
Then all that was left was putting it to the test and letting enough time pass to see traction and decide if it’s sufficient.
As you start thinking in these lanes, you might come up with your own process.
In the meantime I’d like to share my ideas for achieving beneficial differentiation in a ready-to-go 5-step blueprint:
1. Study Your Craft with Intention
This is arguably the step that slows down the rest (but a vital one).
Being different requires a fundamental understanding of the field you’re working with — and or knowledge of other fields to draw inspiration from.
To be different, by its definition, means you need to know what you’re differentiating yourself from.
This is because the very nature of innovation requires knowledge of what needs improving. And equally important what doesn’t require improving.
If you decided that an umbrella’s canopy is too conducive to picking up wind, turning inside out and making you stumble around, creating it out of steel wouldn’t exactly improve its function as an umbrella.
“That’s a silly example, nobody would do that”, I hear you thinking.
You’re probably right. But to hammer home why being different for the sake of being different is unhelpful, allow me to introduce you to the Coolest Cooler:
If you study your craft and you find that some things have not changed much throughout years and years, consider the fact that there might be an excellent reason as to why it hasn’t.
This isn’t an excuse to not swim against the current.
It’s a reason to not spend hours wasting your time trying to differentiate yourself from something that seems endlessly complex and resource-exhausting to solve in a sustaining manner.
Especially if you’re operating as a one-man team. So, study your craft with intention.
To skip spending 10 years on this step, here is a cheatsheet to bypass becoming a traditional expert. Ask yourself:
- What are the big names in my industry/art/field/sport? What did they do to make them credible and how can I best learn from them?
- What are the tropes, clichés & platitudes in my field? Why have they become this way, and what role do they fill in their mainstream success? For example, standard financial advice says “focus on saving” because it fills the role of being easily actionable for the masses (compared to something like “create value for others”, which is infinitely harder).
- Who/what area seems to be underserved? What exists in excess and what’s missing? Why is this? This bullet point is to make sure you don’t start spiraling down the lanes of the aforementioned Coolest Cooler.
You must understand the past to build a different future.
But when you’re specifically in business, you shouldn’t solely look to the past.
If you try to improve on what’s already been done you will inevitably start competing to be better again. You must look towards what you can uniquely serve.
Regardless of your field though, this next part will put you on the fast lane to beneficial differentiation.
2. Break Down Your Craft → Build It Back Up Differently
This is where the magic happens.
If you gave two people a bike each and asked them to reconstruct them into something else, this might occur:
Person A analyzes the bike. Two wheels available? Perfect. Put them parallel to each other, place the seat in the middle. Person A creates a wheelchair.
Person B analyzes the bike. They acknowledge that there are two wheels available, but ponder creating a unique experience through subtraction. Person B removes one of the wheels and creates a unicycle.
To restructure, add and subtract are all examples of differentiation tools.
Below I have listed some ideas you can add to your toolkit on how to break down & rethink your components:
- What is the general opinion of each component? Why does it sell or is it on the way out, or perhaps both at the same time? A lot of people complain about certain novel tropes, but the authors keep writing them because that’s what the masses still end up buying in the end.
- Apply the 20/80 rule: what 20% of components seem to stand for 80% of the sum’s benefits? If you broke down boxing, landing a KO punch would arguably be part of the 20% that yields 80% of the results. In this example, creating a new technique to yield KOs would create more benefit than something like switching to more breathable boxing trunks.
- How could you differentiate yourself through each component? To get your juices flowing, what would it look like if you did the exact opposite on each component than what is currently done?
As you think more about differentiation, some components will start to stick out as more valuable to innovate on than others.
This is critical, because trying to do everything is equivalent to doing nothing at all on an executional level. How do you avoid this?
This next step will guide you to make sure you’re executing on the right aspects.
3. Design & Implement a System for Hole-In-One Results
Now, you’re sitting with an outline of the data points to collect in your lap.
Good! Now comes the real work.
To collect these data points you need a system to work them. You decide on a period, say three months.
Within this timeframe you make a plan how you are going to collect data on each component.
👉 If you were a boxer, practicing your new technique and finding suitable sparring partners to try it on would be a good start.
👉 If you were a painter, painting images in your new way and getting feedback through a painting community online would be great.
The important thing is to design a system that focuses on creating the right kind of result.
If you want to be a paid content writer, which system do you think would be of a more appropriate design?
1) A system revolving around publishing more quality articles
2) A system revolving around writing as many words per day as possible
Ding-ding, it’s system number one.
If you want to be a paid writer, publishing articles is of paramount importance. There is more to publishing an article than just writing words: there’s headline creation, formatting, editing, etc.
Though if you needed to get into the habit of writing in the first place, system number two would probably be more helpful (and realistic).
Few things are as unmotivating as moving the needle in the wrong direction.
This is why you must design your system to support your goal of differentiation, not hinder it. Ask yourself:
- What is the result I’m looking for with my point of differentiation (PoD)?
- What daily habits can I create to best test my PoD often?
- What is the minimum timeframe needed to test my PoD and still have a good chance of seeing notable feedback?
Write it down and make it actionable. While it’s important to design a good system, you don’t want to get stuck overthinking this easily overthinkable step.
99% of the time you’ll improve your system over time to better fulfill its purpose. In the meantime, just get going.
Fire, then re-aim.
4. Evaluate Data + Sharpen Your Sword = Unrivaled Returns
Hello again, I say pretending you’ve just gone ahead and killed it with your test run during this short time.
After having moved the needle inside your area of differentiation, you’ll have come out with real-life data on each of the components you set out to collect.
Depending on how long you ran the test and how big of a wave you managed to make, you’ll have varying levels of clarity as to what’s working (and what’s not).
Now, you have to assess their worth.
If 10,000 or 10 people resonated with your idea, you have to assess whether that’s enough to continue going in this direction.
Now stay with me in this arbitrary example.
There is a reason you cannot make a one-size-fits-all assessment and automatically decide that 10,000 is better.
This is because 10,000 people could be willing to pay $1, or 10 people could be willing to pay $1000 for your idea. The outcome would be the same on paper.
You have to assess your data points’ worth depending on what you are trying to accomplish with your differentiation.
Money is a clear example, but let’s go back to the author scenario for a broader look:
If a faceless crowd of 10,000 people resonated with your story, that’s great. But if you wrote an underground, super niche type story appealing to 10 people being willing to religiously read and support your work — that’s another kind of data point with another spectrum of success. There are many routes to serving people with your differentation.
Here are some ideas on how to process and evaluate each data point:
💡: Create a scorecard consisting of the metrics most relevant to your craft. Now run each component through the scorecard, and you’ll have a rough-to-precise conclusion of their individual worth depending on how exhaustive of a scorecard you created.
💡: After you have assessed each data point, you could apply the 80/20 principle. This will determine what points of differentiation give you the highest ROI (return on investment).
💡: Focusing on these high ROI points, run another test. Do another round of “elimination” or simply ponder them further to come up with better ways of delivering their value. Find ways to make your nuggets of gold shine even brighter.
Evaluate your data points and use them to sharpen your sword for the next test run.
After slaying even more metaphorical monsters in the forest, you’ll come out the other side with a fresh set of data points to evaluate.
Rinse and repeat until you’ve gathered the cream of the crop returns for your efforts.
5. Display & Market Your Differentiation for Optimal Reach
Rocking your own thing is great.
If you’re that competitive boxer looking to win more bouts, telling everybody about your new training routine would be a mistake.
But in other cases, chances the craft you have in your mind is going to have to impress others. Impress them, help them and change them.
If your test runs already made you interact with the world, that’s a headstart.
You need to reach people and shine a spotlight on your beneficial differentation.
👉 If you came up with a new and effective way of building beautiful and practical wooden cabinets, but nobody sees their worth, you won’t end up seeing them in every home. You need to make an impact.Luckily, beneficial differentiation can be applied to many aspects of your process.
Chances are if you have something new and radical and you want the world to know about it, solely relying on existing marketing channels and practices won’t get you all the way. They’re crowded and make few heads turn.
To get your head spinning with ideas on how to reach out, here are a few questions to ask yourself:
🎥 How can you best convey what you uniquely do? In video, writing, audio or illustration? How would you summarize its value into an ad?
👫 Who are you looking to serve, and who are you not necessarily looking to serve?
🕑 When & where is what you do relevant? A time of year time of day? In a specific city or a few countries?
📣 What are the conventional marketing channels for your field? Why is this, and is there an adjacent channel you can use for your purposes?
🤩 Who are the “super fans” of your field? Where are they, and how can you reach out to them and get them involved?
Answering this could be the basis for designing a Facebook ad and knowing who to target and how to target them, or how to set up shop locally to attract people to your innovation.
The answer here all lies in the how.
How you best market your differentiation will come down to the craft it’s in, what it’s trying to do and what it lends itself best to — which is beyond the scope of a “blanket” article like this one.
If you answer and brainstorm the questions above it should serve as a jumping-off point for how to custom-market and display your unique value.
Tying It Together
This is a fascinating process, isn’t it?
We all have an innate desire to bring something unique to the table in life. And with a little gumption we can get there.
Here is a quick summary of what we’ve talked about in this article:
- Study your craft intentionally
- Break down your craft into components
- Design & implement a system to collect data on your components
- Evaluate your data & repurpose it into sharper tests
- Market your beneficial differentiation appropriately
I hope you use this article as a baseline to brainstorm your endeavors from, and more than that I hope you come up with your own methods to suit your needs. Turn your methods into successes and wow the rest of us, please and thank you!
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