Lifehack

Finding Vs. Making Your Place In The World

Some people seem to naturally find their place in the world. As kids their “talents” become apparent, they get really good at their talents. They study, train and ultimately get a great job or start a company doing their thing. If this is you, congratulations. And you don’t really need to read this post.

But if you, like me, grew up on the island of misfit toys, you might want to keep reading. Those of us, who can’t find our place in the world, have to make our place in the world.

Meet my friend Dushka Zapata. She is a successful marketing and PR executive, turned communications coach and public speaker. And for years she was also a writer. In a sea of thosands of other writers. Not now. She made a new place in the world for herself. She designed a new category of writer by combining her unique point of view with a new platform – Quora. Today, Dushka is an “amateur social writer” who built her career not with books, but by responding to directly to people’s questions on Quora. For free.

Traditional writers can hide from their readers behind keyboards while getting paid to publish books. Dushka is the opposite. Almost everything she writes is in response to a question someone cares about. And everything she writes is available for free. And she makes herself available to her readers almost daily.

Today Dushka’s name has become synonymous with “amateur social writer” and in some ways with Quora itself. Her work has been viewed almost 52 million times on Quora alone and she’s a best selling author. By way of comparison, Hilary Clinton’s Quora posts have 31 million Quora views.

More importantly Dushka has been able to make a difference to millions, by parlaying what she loves to do, into a new category --- she created.

Personal Category Design: Position Yourself or Be Positioned

When companies do this it’s called “category design”. It’s a management discipline that helps companies create more than a new product, but a whole new market category. Historically, the innovators who successfully design a new product, company and category are the big winners.

Category design on the personal level is about making your place in the world --- connecting what makes you unique to a problem people care about and then positioning you as the solution.

Category design is different than “personal branding”. Branding preaches making your name known -- the more people hear or see your brand the better. Category design is about owning a niche, based on solving a problem of importance.

Personal category design is about taking advantage of the exponential value of your different versus the incremental value of your better to achieve a unique position of in your field. Imagine being so respected in your field that other people who do similar things are compared to you. Because you are the category king.

In some ways category design is the life hack.

Pablo Picasso was “just” another painter. Until he explained to the world that what he was doing was a new style of paining called cubism. Cubism was different. It required different skills to paint and a different paradigm to appreciate. He taught the world to think the way he did. And as a result, Pablo changed the definition of what a painting is. He was the category designer of cubism. When cubism took off, it took Pablo with it. He became the cubist category king.

A company’s value largely depends on three factors. First is the potential for it’s category. Second, the position of the company in that category, because the category king takes most of the economics. And the third factor is performance -- proof that the category king can deliver on its promises to the category.

A version of that formula applies to people. Over time many successful people “own” the category king position in their market – however big or small the category.

All of us at some point in life face the decision to either make ourselves fit the world or make the world fit us. So whether you’re an aspiring accountant, cook or a wanna-be Evan Spiegel (founder of Snap Chat) here are some questions to consider when designing your own personal category.

1) What problem do I solve?

New categories emerge when a new problem gets defined (Henry Ford with “horseless carriage”) or an existing problem gets re-imagined (Travis Kalanick Uber founder with “smartphone-powered, personal transportation”).

The bigger and more urgent the problem, the more time and money people will put into solving it. Becoming a category king in many ways is a function of becoming known for solving a problem that matters.

2) What makes you different, NOT better

When you position yourself as better, you are moving into someone else’s territory, always fighting for attention and having to prove that you’re better than someone. When two people say, “I’m the best,” by definition one of them is lying.

The minute you say your better than X, what people are left thinking about is X - NOT you. For years Pepsi made a multi-billion dollar fuck up by running ads comparing themselves to Coke with a campaign called, “The Pepsi Challenge” proclaiming that Pepsi is better than Coke. All this effort did was reinforce to the world that Coke is the category king of soda. After decades of cola category wars Coke controls 42% of the space with Pepsi's 30%, according to Beverage Digest.

When you position yourself as different, you aren’t climbing someone else’s ladder -- you’re building your own and putting yourself on the top rung. It’s not an easier path. In fact, being different can be a challenging path. But ultimately it puts you in a more advantageous position than if you constantly fight for better. You get to own your own category.

3) Develop Your Point of View

Here’s where you put yourself under the microscope, figure out who you are and develop your story. Putting yourself through a POV exercise can be incredibly clarifying. How do you define who you are and what you want to mean to the world? How do you want people to see you? How do you want to describe the problem you solve? Write it down, perfect your story and hone it until it sounds like a tight, conversational, presentation -- so that if you had two minutes to position yourself, you could go through your POV and anyone would “get” you.

Your category makes your career

Category designers start out as struggling pirates, dreamers and/or innovators. The ones that design their own personal category achieve the deep-rooted satisfaction that comes making their very own place in the world.