Personal Product Strategy - Your Personality Unlocks Your Category of One
Just as a commercial product needs to understand the core personas they serve (Personas Are the Heart of a Product Strategy]), your personal product strategy also needs your ideal persona -- the tribe of people you best resonate with.
Now that AI streamlines the content creation process, just producing content alone is not sufficient to unlock your Category of One.
You need to define a category and dominate it.
One of the sources for this is your personality.
"Know thyself."
Unfortunately, this level of understanding is not taught in most schools. Children, including my own, aren't spending time learning about what makes them different, what is their advantage.
No, they are taught the common denominators towards sameness.
Many of these skills likely are fundamentals that AI can reproduce more easily and cheaply.
While discovering your own Category of One is critical and urgent right now in terms of job satisfaction, income, and perhaps even long-term health, enabling your children to build this is even more critical.
Most parents tend to place their kids in the competition zone. A fascinating book on the recruitment strategy of law and consulting firms (citation here) illustrates two key points: 1) they deeply understood the persona of their recruits; 2) training kids to unnecessarily adopt this persona does them no favors.
Status seeking is, unfortunately, a big part of the human experience. I'm not saying that status itself is bad. Status is essential signal.
The chasing of status, however, can be unproductive.
For example, the false belief that one achieves status by purchasing expensive luxury items that are way out of one's budget is unproductive.
However, pursuing a niche project that gives one the financial independence that leaves behind fingerprints of status would be more healthy.
Proper status is "proof of work."
False status is derived from something else.
High quality signal needs something to confer that value.
So what is necessary to achieve proper status that comes from "proof of work"?
Consistent action in the pursuit of a contrarian, correct, conviction.