How I Broke Through: The Messy Process I Used to Develop a Differentiated Premise
In 2015, I decided to attack an enemy with my work: average content.
I'd spent years working on marketing teams at brands big and small, ranging from Google and HubSpot to a tiny startup nobody’s heard of. After that time, I emerged disillusioned with the entire field. I was ashamed at how much mediocrity I'd shipped and even more frustrated with the mentality of settling which, to me at least, felt endemic to the industry.
After writing about my disdain for average content a few times, I decided to launch a podcast. I called it Unthinkable. The name hinted at my frustration at the time. I was ranting to my friend and business speaker extraordinaire Andrew Davis about my true feelings on the industry. It sounded something like this:
"Here's a novel idea: instead of create endless mediocre crap, why not create genuinely GOOD things? Wouldn't those things be easier to promote? Isn't it easier to get a well-built rocket into orbit? Then why do we keep duct-taping together scrap metal and trying to yeet it into the sun? It's called 'content marketing' NOT 'marketing content.' Which comes first? So here's a WILD concept: instead of pushing harder to generate subscribers, make things worth subscribing to. Instead of obsessing over growing followers, do something worth following. I'm so tired of saying to people in marketing, Hey, yanno that thing you're making? You should make it GOOD. What a shocker! What a CRAZY idea!"
He smirked, "You should call the show Unthinkable."
I knew the enemy of the story I wanted to tell the world.
Average content.
That was the illness in our industry. Of that, I was certain.
But I was wrong.
* * *
When our work doesn't stand out or resonate enough to see the results we want, most of us blame the promotion of that work. We assume it’s a problem with the channel, the distribution strategy, the optimization of the work. We examine all these incremental things, because the truth is harder to look in the face: fundamentally, the idea itself wasn't strong enough to yield results.
As a reaction to that, we end up working too hard to try and squeeze results from something that wasn't built for results to begin with. Think of it this way:
Everyone wants their work to grow, but in most cases, we don’t create things that are inherently growable.
We think we have a reach problem. More often, we have a resonance problem. Reach is how many see it, and resonance is how much they care. No amount of reach guarantees they care, and if they don’t care, they don’t act. If they don’t act, we don’t see results — so from resonance comes results.
That’s the core issue the majority of the time, I’m convinced. It’s not that you didn’t market something correctly. It’s that you didn’t create something that showed others why they’d care. You didn’t resonate. (I define resonance as the urge to act others feel when a message or moment aligns so closely with them, they feel amplified. That feeling we’ve encountered before that makes us go, “YES! THIS!” — that is resonance. It’s literally an energy being transferred, as with the idea of resonant frequencies in the sciences.)
To resonate:
You're smart enough.
You're expert enough.
But what if your IP isn't strong enough?
You're producing enough volume, but in all that volume, the work lacks power.
Your power comes from your premise. That's the defensible assertion you make, pulled from your perspective, which from which your choices and your reputation.
The premise is the missing piece.
When you develop a premise, I believe it should always start in the same place: frustration.
What can't you stand about the status quo? What pisses you off about the industry or how things usually unfold around you? Forget your gripes with how buying choices are made. The competition isn’t the problem. What’s something in the status quo, the culture, the work your audience is doing, the history they seemed doomed to repeat … which you want to change? It doesn't need to be society-wide, but it does need to be a problem that exists whether or not you and competitors exist.
"My clients need to stop paying for cheap solutions from my competitors." Not what I mean.
"My clients need to stop seeing their own customer relationships as transactions and recognize they're in the business of transformations." We're on a better path towards differentiation now.
This isn't about finding some mystical higher calling for your business. This is about identifying a foundational issue facing your clients.
Have you found it?
In 2016, I thought I found mine: average content is the illness. Of that, I was certain.
Yeaaah, I was wrong.
Because then I began to interview my listeners.
Every month for my first year making that show, I scheduled 5 calls with listeners and email subscribers. Every call was 30 minutes. I'd spend the first 15 minutes asking them questions to learn about their work and their problems (rarely asking about my show or relationship to me, by the way), and then they could use the second half of the call however they wanted — catching up or talking shop or picking my brain.
Those calls changed the trajectory of my career. That's not hyperbole. It showed me that I had NOT identified the actual illness I was here to cure, despite my assumption, and that diagnosing the core problem you wish to solve takes a lot of aerating your ideas, talking to people, and writing your way through things. Again, those calls changed my career. I would not make the mistake of stopping at the symptom in the future.
I started by feeling SO certain I'd found the foundational problem, immediately. It was average content. But my listeners showed me otherwise. It turned out, not all of them were marketers, and many of the non-marketers weren't even creating content. What they had in common was deeper, more about their identities: they loved being creative in some sense in their work, and they hated the stale norms of their industries. Hearing a bunch of professionals talk about unconventional choices and projects (even if they were mainly content marketers) was refreshing to them.
So sure, I talked to plenty of marketers and creators but also independent management consultants, fractional CTOs and COOs, performance coaches, and advisors working with clients on growth, culture, hiring, and more — lots of independent professionals who sell high-ticket services. That became my audience and remains my core client base when I do 1:1 consulting. (More on that offering on my home page.)
I’d found a symptom of an illness, but not the illness itself.
What caused average content?
Best practices.
My audience and I both hated the idea of "best practices" at work. We always questioned them, rejected them, saw them for what they really are: average practices. Generalized advice. Non-specific and thus often overpromised tips.
My audience saw the obsession with best practices gripping those around them too: their clients, their current or former employers, their peers. They believed that over-reliance on conventional wisdom was THE barrier to exceptional work. No, my audience didn't say the phrase "best practices," but they'd complain about red tape and playbooks, blueprints and false-gurus with supposed secrets. They'd talk about how boring or routine things got and how much their bosses or clients loved to trend-hop or seek savior tactics.
I began attacking that problem next.
I posted across my socials:
"I want a Chrome browser extension that changes the word 'best' in 'best practices' to 'average.'"
People loved that. More importantly, I did too. I could see myself making a living helping people question or even break from best practices, I thought. I had no cure yet, but at least I'd found the illness. It felt more certain this time.
My creative platform shifted to talk about the problems with best practices and explore why they're so popular, why they're problematic, what happens when we follow them versus break from them, and who is successfully building in their own unique and unconventional way.
I'd found the illness. Of that, I was certain.
But once again, I was wrong.
As I kept writing and speaking about this issue, I realized, wait, there's something even more foundational underneath this. The obsession with best practices in our culture is, itself, a symptom of an illness gripping us all. So what's the illness? I didn't know yet. I sensed it, but I couldn't articulate it.
Then one day, as I wrote about the usual topics, this line flowed from my fingertips:
"Finding best practices isn't the goal. Finding the best approach for you is."
Wait. There's something in there! Is this what I've been missing?
"Finding best practices isn't the goal. Finding the best approach for YOU is."
Why don't you start with the "YOU" piece of this? Why do most of us begin our work by turning outward, not inward, seeking right answers? Why do we assume best practices are, in fact, the best, when really they can't consider the specifics of OUR unique situations? We treat them like precise math problems, but without considering variables unique to us, we're running faulty equations. Why do we do that?
School.
To be clear, school didn't become the enemy I attacked, but something about our schooling led us here — and the corporate world only perpetuates the problem.
In school, you're handed right answers. You're told to sit in lines and don't be weird and don't make mistakes otherwise you'll get your test back bleeding red ink. Don't share a response to the question they ask you unless you're absolutely, totally, 100% certain it's the right answer. Because having the right answer is the point of school. Having the right answer is the point of ... you.
That is the illness. That is the foundational problem. We are deathly afraid of being wrong, so we seek the right answer — hell, we can’t operate without the right answer. That’s the actual illness. I called it…
The tyranny of the right answer.
So I start writing and podcasting and speaking some more, all about how we are trained to "have" the right answer, not search for it. From a young age, our self-worth is bottled up in this notion that being smart and valuable and successful means you already know. If you don't know, don't speak up. Don't raise your hand to find out. Don't make a mess and try stuff. Don't investigate and definitely don’t do it your way. Self-awareness doesn't matter. Awareness of the correct response is. The industrial revolution spawned our public education system, meant to create compliant workers in factories and industrialized farms. Any notion of exploring or expressing or innovation wasn’t ever part of the plan. Why be surprised when blueprints supersede intuition in the collective consciousness?
You are worthy when you have the right answer. You are worthless when you don’t. We live in a tyranny of the right answer, and that’s the illness.
I rode that train of thought awhile, and everything felt like it ran smoother and faster. I also saw the world through that lens, so everywhere I went, I saw inspiration. That latest trend, that guru that has a thick layer of "ick" I can't stand but others don't seem bothered by, even things from outside our echo chamber held meaning to this pursuit of mine.
I remember watching a documentary about the physical and digital interfaces and experiences we encounter called Design Disrupters from the software company InVision. I don't usually spend time learning about design, but this seemed like a glossy and cool thing a brand was doing. While watching it, they talked about an experiment involving two types of fish: a pike and some minnows. You can train the pike not to eat the minnows while in the same tank if you first put some glass between them. The pike will smash against the invisible barrier enough times that it suffers from what we call "learned helplessness." The documentary concluded that this is why humans just accept terrible design interfaces and experiences as we move through the physical and digital worlds. We've just learned to accept it, not question it, not expect better.
Ah ha! That's why we don't consider our own intuition powerful enough to trust. That's why we don't consider the tiny variables floating just inches from our own noses in our own unique work situations each day. We have learned not to trust ourselves. We have learned not to pursue those minnows. We have learned helplessness.
THAT can be used in my exploration now too. I’ll import it and mold it to my investigation.
We want to be right. We live in this tyrannical culture, dominated by needing to "have" the answer. We bend over backwards to avoid being wrong. This starts in school, then the corporate world reinforces that — because the corporate world is full of people who were trained to think that way too.
This is why creativity and business often conflict, because you can't KNOW ahead of time that a creative approach will work. That's why it's creative or innovative or artful. You can't spell it out in a deck and guarantee it will run like that in the real world. You can only try it, then adjust based on what's working and, just as importantly, what's not. Business leaders have a tough time with that. They beat back the ideas often enough, and like invisible glass, we emerge worse for it. We learn to be helpless.
As a result, we default to NEEDING the right answer in all the things before we can act. That is THE mark of a worthy individual. We are living under the tyranny of the right answer.
Once I found the illness to diagnose and cure, somewhere between 2016 and 2017, it's like I could draw a coherent circle around my work. That's one major benefit of a premise. But it wouldn’t have happened unless I learned to look beyond symptoms and how tempting it felt to merely address those.
My process went like this:
Assumed Illness #1: Average content. I started with my own experiences and observations, felt my frustration, and then landed here. I was certain, but I was wrong.
Assumed Illness #2: It's not average work that's to blame. That's actually a symptom of best practices. So THAT is the enemy, I suppose. I turned my personal frustration into curiosity, talking to others around me. Did they feel it too? Did they see it this way? Turns out, no, it's slightly different. I was certain again, but I was also wrong again.
Actual Illness: But the obsessive reliance on best practices itself is a symptom of something deeper: the tyranny of the right answer. I pointed my frustration and my curiosity at a big body of work, which helped shake loose certain ideas and observations, which clicked in my mind to help show me what I was really trying to solve in the world.
Curing the Illness: So how do we escape something built around having the right answers? We ask better questions. I began writing much more about intuition and curiosity and breaking from best practices NOT by being a rebel but by being more curious.
The Premise, Made Clear: And now, I can finally make my defensible assertion, developed from my personal perspective. This premise carried the book into the world, all my surrounding content, all my speaking, all my client work ... and me with it all.
My premise for a time:
We should stop acting like experts and start acting like investigators.
And my method, put onto stages and printed into books, was to understand which variables were unique to you, not generalized best practices (your presence in the work + your specific audience + your resource constraints), then ask 2 categories of questions in your investigation to understand those variables and incorporate them into your decisions (trigger questions + confirmation questions). I proposed 6 in my book, but I also made clear: you should find your own.
Because you should stop acting like an expert and start acting like an investigator.
So you can break from best practices, or at least question them.
Because best practices lead to average work.
* * *
My book had a premise, but so did my entire platform.
By the way, this is the name of that book, published in 2018:
Break the Wheel: Question Best Practices, Hone Your Intuition, and Do Your Best Work [find it here]
Developing a defensible premise, shaped by your perspective, is a creative craft. The ability to differentiate and resonate is just that -- an ability, a skill, something you can learn and improve. It's within our control. But we face a choice: we can continue trying to ship more volume into the world, or we can try to compete on the impact of our ideas.
The impact of an idea is proportional to two things: how valuable it is to others and how original it is to you. When you develop an idea -- for anything, not just your overall brand or platform's premise -- remember it's about more than cheap tricks to grab attention. It's about solving difficult problems for others in better, more refreshing ways.
There's an old joke that's been around for ages, maybe you've heard it. "I went to the doctor and said, 'Doctor, doctor! It hurts when I do that!' And he said, 'Don't do that!'"
This is most of your peers today. They're treating symptoms. But the craft of premise development and indeed the path towards serving others better require you to figure out the illness first, then develop a cure. This won’t be declared in theory as you brainstorm or an idea strikes you. This requires you to aerate and update your thinking through actively creating content and having conversations about your ideas, constantly. That's what makes it defensible. That's what makes it yours. It’s built. It’s developed.
Your content isn't a means to share what you know. That’s become commodified. Instead, it’s a mean to share what you’d like to know. Writing is thinking. Creating is investigating.
Stop acting like an expert. Start acting like an investigator.
You're assuming you know, but take it from me: don't be so certain.
Looking to become a stronger storyteller in your work?
On How Stories Happen, experts, entrepreneurs, and world-class creators dissect signature stories and drafts with me, piece by piece. You’ll hear how they found their ideas, how they developed them into stories, and how they use those stories to build their careers, companies, and communities.
Hear the trailer below, or find the show in your favorite podcast player >>