How to find your personal category of one

The competition in any field cannot be won by being "better."

That requires just working harder or longer.

This race to the bottom affects everyone, every professional, every solopreneur, and in the end, every business, including tech start ups.

The hardest and most existentially critical skills for anyone is being able to stand out in a meaningfully valuable way as an individual.

In most corporations, people are able to embed themselves in tribal social dynamics play "politics" or leverage personal privileges to stay entrenched within bureaucratic structures.

Not only is that soul-sucking, but it's not that efficient.

50% or more of anyone's time working in a mid to large sized organization is just perception and relationship management.

Those skills are important, to be sure.

But it's like politicans: when they don't really have anything to offer, they'll offer anything.

And we can see where that gets most of them and what it gets those of us who are part of the system but don't play it as well.

There really shouldn't be a reason why work should not be enjoyable daily. It can, even in large bureaucratic structures.

But it often doesn't. The tribe isn't meant to be truly protective.

So we are all effectively free agents.

What will prepare my kids?

As my two kids are heading towards middle school, I am anxiously thinking about how will they compete and thrive in such a future.

Their competition will be AI, robots, and peers across the ocean.

To me, the only skill that really matters is, in fact, discovering and executing upon your "personal category of one."

There are other, perhaps better, names like "Personal Monopoly" but the idea is still so critical: how can one be "So Good They Can't Ignore You."^[1]

(note to self: re-read that book)

As I've thought about it, and I've thought about it alot, going through things like Strengths Finders and my go to Myers Briggs, I feel the answer cannot just be found within ourselves.

We must enter a market and defend it just like any product which has found so-called product-market fit.

I appreciate how Category Pirates are tackling this topic from a business perspective and, occasionally, from the personal. I think we can take many of the best product and GTM frameworks and apply them to people.

Or at least I hope so.

Because I am definitely struggling to do so, myself, but think that writing about my research and my process could help.

I have to do it for not only myself, but for my two children.

And I believe that everyone needs to know what "this" is. Knowing "this" -- their personal category of one -- means being able to answer a few questions:

1. Why you are different?
2. Who cares about your difference?
3. Why do they care?
4. How do you sustain this?

The problem, for me, has been all the books and webinars on the topic felt....snake-oily.

They focused on things like "purpose" and "re-invention" and the tenor of the well-intentioned motivational speakers writing about it felt too "rah-rah" for me.

But I think I was also just too lazy to find the answers to their legitimate questions about what is my purpose, what am I good at, what is my experience.

I was lazy. Unstructured. And probably a little depressed about the fact that I just didn't have a crisp answer.

But I think everyone needs to know this. Our educational system is failing children by not equipping them to answer this question.

If we continue on the path of factory-education, we'll be doomed.

If we continue on lowest-denominator skills, my kids will be doomed.

I probably could go back to the half-dozen books that I have read in the past to help me. But they didn't help for a reason.

They weren't bad. They just didn't speak in a way that helped me.

Maybe I'm just a bad apple.

Or maybe there can and should be a better way.

Off the top of my head, if I had to instruct someone, what would I do?

1. What are your interests?
2. Why are you interested in them?
3. What can you do to lean into them to stand out (more than just a hobby?)
4. Who benefits from this?
5. What are those benefits?
6. How do people find out about this?
7. What do you need to do to dig in and build valuable expertise?
8. What are your natural strengths and temperament to make you stand out?

I wish I had an area of deep interest, passion, and capability.

I liked programming since young, but was never someone who could stand out. I struggled with it.

When I fell into product management, I didn't understand or appreciate what it was and could be. Now it's become a discipline on its own, and I am drowning in a sea of people with similar skills and capabilities -- perhaps better than me.

I still think Blue Ocean was an eye-opening book in principle and in methodology, and I believe that everyone needs to pursue this in their career and soloproneurship.

Then there's the matter of skills.

The reality is that software is eating the world, and I don't think it will be possible to not have a truly programmatic, technical skill and thrive.

Maybe some of this is shifting as low-code/no-code and generative AI comes to the fore-front, but even then, having comfort with technical concepts will always have an advantage.

But the second pillar is extreme marketing creativity: the ability to deliver results in customer acquisition.

It's funny, I anticipated this, but I didn't go all in because I couldn't come up with a roadmap of how to do so.

I majored in both electrical engineering, with a focus on systems dynamics and neural networks, and English literature because I believed then, as I believe now, that technical understanding and creative expression are two pillars that will be essential to advancing in society.

But I didn't know how to apply those.

I guess I still don't.

But I'm going to focus on how to do this, and hopefully find a way to hone my skills by helping others to do so.

Updates

Sunday, March 26th 2023

I realize that I need to be willing to keep coming back to this same topic and start to apply the ideas for both myself and for others.

Is there a principle behind the Cobbler's Children Has No Shoes?

Because I feel like I have a version of this, but I don't know what studies there are about this. I'd love to know.

Externalizing a process, for me, feels much easier than applying it, especially if it is about myself.

One idea that I have had has been to help academics go popular.

There is something I like about this. This actually is me still searching for my category of one.^[2]

The second broader category of one is to start Building a Framework for the Category of One.

I dunno.

I'm trying this experiment on a completelky different website and Twitter account. I'm writing about this separately to see how it goes to experiment with this, while I build out my real one here.