How to Differentiate Your ideas: The XY Premise Pitch
I’m not exactly sure which synapse in my brain fails to fire correctly, but for my entire life, I’ve been a huge fan of the basketball team known as the New York Knicks.
(Please clap. Or send condolences.)
For most of my life, the Knicks have been bad. Oh-so-very-bad.
On the one hand, being a fan helps you learn lots of cool words like “crestfallen” and “moribund” and “woebegone.” On the other hand is everything else.
But this year, they were good! They were fun to watch. They even made the playoffs. And last week, as I prepared to watch one of their playoff games on delay, recorded on my DVR, I did something bad. Oh-so-very-bad.
I googled “lakers score.”
I’d spent the whole day successfully avoiding spoilers for the Knicks game, only to search for a different team’s results and see this:
NOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!
In an instant, all the excitement and possibility about what could happen during the Knicks game was ripped away from me. The score was right there. The game was spoiled. I was crestfallen. It was a rather moribund moment.
(Pause.)
(Whispers.)
I was woebegone.
BUT! Once that moment passed, I realized: This is exactly like being a creator today.
Everywhere I look, I see the same thing happening to us. And it’s bad. Oh-so-very-bad.
Today, I’d like to share a phenomenon I’m calling Schrödinger’s Content and an exercise we can use to ensure our ideas stand out and connect deeper with others: the XY Premise Pitch.
But before that, I’d like to spend one more moment feeling crestfallen.
The Possibilities Are Endless! (The Possibilities Have Ended.)
Before seeing the Knicks score, anything felt possible. Knicks guard Jalen Brunson could have scored 50 … or 5. Heat guard Jimmy Butler could have dunked on Knicks center Mitchell Robinson so badly he ended his career. Someone could have made history with their performance. The Knicks could win by a lot or win on a buzzer-beater. The walls of the arena could have caved in, I don’t know. I just know anything was possible … until it wasn’t.
And it was my own damn fault.
That’s the thing about creating on the internet. It’s so easy to spoil it for ourselves. As storytellers, we face infinite possibilities for what we could create … until we don’t. We limit ourselves. And it’s usually our own damn fault.
The internet presents us with all the instant answers we could ever want, but within all that digital utility, it can also ruin everything. Maybe that’s the score of a game. Maybe that’s the scope of your writing or podcast or entire creative platform. Just as I had all the possibilities and all the fun taken from me by seeing the Knicks score, we often have creative possibilities stolen from us by seeing examples and best practices pouring down our feeds. Worse, we have a tendency to start our creative process there, turning externally, seeking “the” answers. This means we immediately narrow our personal field of vision — or else start our work with someone else’s.
All these visible best practices, blueprints, and experts sharing their prescriptions or simply sharing work that looks like ours make it nearly impossible to imagine. In fact, moments of imagining probably make you uncomfortable. I know I’ve felt this way plenty of times. (“I’ve got so much to do! This HAS to work! Why reinvent the wheel?! I don’t have time or budget! They’re better at this than me! I don’t have permission to do it any other way!”)
When we get stuck inside our echo chamber, constantly consuming content similar to ours, we struggle to even consider our own, personal possibilities. Imagination? Thinking? Investigating? It all takes a back seat to instant action, because we can find instant answers or ask a tool to provide them for us. Call me crazy, but that’s not how we craft something different than anyone else. Because do you know who can access those same best practices and blueprints? EVERYONE ELSE!
(If someone publishes a report that says the best time to tweet is 3pm … run. Now that it’s out there, guess what? That’s no longer the best time to tweet.)
When this is our reality, instead of attempting a 360-degree windmill alley-oop dunk from the foul line, we quietly walk up to the basket, agonize over every little motion to our shot according to what others told us to do, then slowly lift the ball towards the hoop.
But then THWACK!
Someone more creatively powerful comes soaring out of nowhere and smashes our attempt to smithereens. How’d they DO that? I can’t say, but I’m pretty sure they didn’t spend the last few hours reading Blocking Basketballs: An Ultimate Guide [Free Download].
Being creative is supposed to be about imagining new possibilities using our personal taste and vision. Art is about saying, “This might not work, but if it does, it will work BETTER than the norm.” Stories are supposed to inspire the kind of reflection and action that grows movements, however big or small, broad or niche. But instead, I keep seeing us start our process by intentionally spoiling it for ourselves. We spoil the fun. We spoil the process. We immediately take a limited, narrow view on the possibilities we might try, which leads to something bad.
Oh-so-very-bad.
We struggle to stand out.
We’re making it harder to differentiate
I’m reminded of Schrödinger’s Cat. It’s a thought experiment in which you place a cat inside a box along with some toxins. Before you look inside to see whether the cat is alive or dead, both are “true.” You must accept all possibilities before you look inside to reveal the answer.
Likewise, we experience Schrödinger’s Content. We sit on top of this box and inside are our creative aspirations and tools like Google, Twitter, and ChatGPT. We could immediately look to see what happens when the two meet. Or we could sit there and imagine for a time. Before we turn to these Instant Answer Machines, every idea is valid. But once we look? “Op! Okay! Forget my idea, people! Says here we should do it THIS way.”
But if you don’t spend all your time seeking blueprints? If you don’t spend time consuming content remarkably like your own? You allow yourself even a brief moment to consider a broader range of possibilities. You anchor to things OTHER than the average of your industry, OTHER than the accepted or common approaches from others. This allows you to make things that are MORE remarkable.
Differentiation gets easier if we don’t narrow our perspective. If we keep a broad view on things, turning inward to think or going outside our echo chamber entirely. Rather than start with someone else’s vision for what someone like us should do in our situation, we apply our own personal vision for what WE should do. We start with what feels right or what our taste or lived experience or intuition is urging us to try, rather than what the best practices claim we must do.
At our worst, when we seek quick answers or consume too much industry content, our ideas become anchored to others like us. This means our attempts to differentiate sound like comparisons, and that’s a weak way to differentiate.
So how can we craft stronger ideas? How can we stand out better? How can we get our own creative fingerprints and personal vision into the work so we differentiate?
The XY Premise Pitch.
How to Differentiate: The XY Premise Pitch
Your premise is the specific, defensible purpose for a project or your overall platform, pulled from your personal vision for your audience. Most work is too generic to resonate, too forgettable to become anyone’s favorite. But by developing our premise — and forcing ourselves to test just how differentiated it truly feels to others — we stand a greater chance of connecting more deeply and standing out more easily.
The XY premise pitch runs like this:
This is a project about X.
Unlike other projects about X, only we Y.
Here, X is your topic and Y is your hook, your angle or conceit or belief system. X is what you explore. That’s not differentiated. Y is how you explore it. That might help you separate.
Here are a few examples:
This is a podcast about living an awesome life. Unlike other podcasts about living an awesome life, only 3 Books with Neil Pasricha asks its guests to discuss the three books that most transformed their lives, as we search for the 1,000 most transformative books in the world.
This is a YouTube series about superheroes. Unlike other YouTube series about superheroes, only Power Levels treats TV and movie footage as real evidence and talks to real physicists to determine which characters are most powerful.
This is a newsletter about trends in society and business. Unlike other newsletters about trends in society and business, only Glimpse highlights trends right before they happen.
This is a podcast about music. Unlike other podcasts about music, only Song Exploder asks musicians to take apart their songs and, piece by piece, tell the story of how they were made. (PS: You can hear the story of this show on Unthinkable, as I recently had the chance to speak with host Hrishikesh Hirway.)
In all the above cases, these creators operate in very saturated spaces. Their topics don’t differentiate them. But because they’ve developed specific, defensible purposes for their work, pulled from their personal visions for their audience, they stand out easier.
Why is it personal? Well, take Hrishikesh for example. He started Song Exploder from a simple yet personal place: most interviews with most musicians are too broad to be overly useful for artists like Hrishikesh who think about making music all day. At best, other interviewers try to get general wisdom from artists, but even that stuff is far more powerfully shared when you get closer to the process of creating a single song. He has a personal vision for the audience and the show.
Or take another podcaster in music who approaches it slightly differently: Cole Cuchna, creator/host of Dissect. Here’s what he says on his site about the personal vision he has for the show. Bold statements are mine.
“Dissect is a serialized music podcast that examines a single album per season, one song per episode. [That’s the hook, the Y to the XY pitch. Now here’s why this hook is from his personal vision, not just a gimmick…] In a world creating and accessing more content than ever before, we’ve quickly become a scrolling culture, hurriedly swiping through this infinite swath of content that seems to replenish without end. Dissect was created to counter this cultural shift. Because great art deserves more than a swipe.”
In your work: The key to using XY Premise Pitch
Crucially, for the XY pitch to work, i.e. for you to establish true differentiation for yourself, the Y can’t be a comparison.
We’ve all experienced those creators who go, “Unlike others, I actually get the practical, the raw, the unfiltered, the truth, the [whatever].” But competitors would go, “Hold on, I do that too.”
In my earlier examples, however, none of those creators play comparison games. Other creators who talk about living an awesome life would freely admit that 3 Books is different from their approach. The “Y” stands alone. That’s why the premise works. Simply by describing your premise through the XY pitch, your competitors should freely admit, “Yeah, no: we don’t do that.”
Unfortunately, most of us get stuck playing comparison games. I think that’s because most of us are quick to spoil the possibilities for ourselves. We can’t wait to see the score. We can’t wait to look in the box at the cat. We can’t wait to figure out the best practice, or else we spend too much time consuming things inside our echo chamber. We adopt a narrow view right from the beginning instead of considering endless possibilities — which should be the hallmark of any creative person. As a result of being so anchored to our peers and competitors, when it’s time to pitch our premises, it sounds like a comparison.
We’re stuck.
Getting Unstuck: Developing a premise in real-time
Let’s imagine for a moment we ran a show which struggled to stand out: The Modern Marketing Show.
This is a totally fictional show, but if it starts to feel oddly familiar, that’s the problem.
Assume our current premise is pretty generic and forgettable:
The world’s top marketers share their perspectives and advice for modern marketing.
This is a show about modern marketing. Unlike other shows about modern marketing, only we” …what? Talk to great people? Get practical advice? Get inspiration? We have work to do here, my friend. We’re relevant to our audience, but not overly resonant. Being relevant is table stakes. We’re just part of the noise.
So we develop the premise further:
The world’s top marketers share their perspectives and advice for modern marketing while eating progressively hotter chicken wings.
Yep. We’re gonna rip-off Hot Ones on YouTube. This might feel more entertaining, perhaps, but the content is ultimately the same: marketers sharing advice. Worse, the wings are irrelevant to our cause. What does this premise say about us? Not much. It’s a missed opportunity, even if it feels more entertaining. There’s no personal vision here, no reason this should come from you or me.
So we develop the premise further:
The world’s top marketers share their perspectives and advice for modern marketing while eating progressively hotter chicken wings and each question gets progressively harder.
A bit better, sure. The wings gimmick affects the content itself. But still, I’m not seeing a personal reason for doing this. Where’s our position as a leader in the space? Where are we going with the audience? What idea do we own, outright, as a result? Let’s make this premise more defensible, more wholly ours, by developing the premise further. Here, we have to get personal. We have to reflect on our own opinions and frustrations and aspirations for this space. So let’s ask some questions:
What’s broken about our space right now? [Write about the problem] Well, marketers today are asked to grapple with an unprecedented amount of change at break-neck speed – and still somehow succeed and stay sane. It’s getting unsustainable, leading to missed numbers and team burnout. Nobody wants to admit that this can’t continue without something seriously changing in how we operate, but it’s true.
What needs to change? [Write about your vision for a solution] Instead of continuing to pile on more and more marketing-related “stuff” to our plates, we need to learn how to adapt and evolve. In fact, for us to succeed — and do so sustainably — marketing has to become a department that masters two things, with the same level of rigor: marketing AND adapting. We have strategies, tactics, and tools for the first. We need the same for the second. Adapting is now a core competency of ours, not just marketing.
How might that affect the premise, your specific (check), defensible (not there yet) purpose for the work, pulled from your personal vision (we just wrote about that) for your audience?
Well, just like YOU face increasing pressure all the time in marketing, we’re going to increase the pressure on our guests. They have to eat progressively spicier chicken wings while answering progressively harder questions, AND we’re going to narrowly focus on discussing the strategies, tactics, systems, and tools they use to adapt and evolve.
This is a show about modern marketing. Unlike other shows about modern marketing, only we talk to marketing leaders about what they’re doing to adapt, while also making them adapt mid-interview to progressively spicy wings and questions.
There’s a purpose here. We believe adaptation is a core competency among marketers. We want to own that idea — and can! It’s specific, yes, but it’s also defensible. That’s ours for the taking. And we aren’t just adding a game mechanic to stand out in a stunt-like way. The gimmick advances our story, our message: it’s all about adapting. Just as marketers must adapt in their work, our guests must adapt on the show.
Differentiate on meaning, not topics
We all want to do work that stands out, but so often we try to push harder on WHAT we discuss, not HOW or WHY. That’s because we keep spoiling the work for ourselves. We start by looking externally, not internally, and so we narrow our view. We take that limited perspective to our work, and so we anchor to our competitive set. Naturally, the lone outcome is to try and differentiate by playing comparison games. But that’s not true, defensible differentiation — nor is our personal perspective evident in the work.
At best, we become useful but forgettable commodities, replaced the moment something resonates more emotionally with our audience — even if it’s a comedy show that replaces our marketing show when our audience needs to free up time. But to become irreplaceable is to connect more deeply than relevant topics. We have to make our work feel personal to others, which means it feels personal to us.
Remember Schrodinger’s Content. Don’t be so eager to look inside the box. Sit there a moment and imagine.
Remember my agony in spoiling the Knicks score, but more so, remember the key difference between that moment and our work:
I can’t actually influence the outcome of the Knicks game, so imagining possibilities was just a fun distraction. But in our work, we can and should take an active role in influencing what we create, driving it with our ideas, imbuing it with our perspectives.
As creators, imagining the possibilities isn’t a distraction. It’s the job.