- Amazon Summary
- About The Authors: Christopher Lochhead & Heather Clancy
- Christopher Lochhead
- Heather Clancy
- Highlights
- Quotes
- Michael's Highlights
- Popular Among Kindle Users
Amazon Summary
This is an inspiring, insightful read for those who want to standout and become known for a niche they own. Because there are riches in niches!
Written by multi-time #1 Amazon bestseller, coAuthor of global sensation "Play Bigger: How Pirates, Dreamers and Innovators Create New Categories and Dominate Markets" and the prolific #1 selling series of Category Pirates ��☠️ books Christopher Lochhead, and renowned #1 bestselling Author and Journalist Heather Clancy.
"Be known for a niche that you own. This is a powerful idea. One that transforms how people think about their lives, careers and business ventures." — Hal Elrod, author of the best-seller, The Miracle Morning: The Not-So-Obvious Secret Guaranteed to Transform Your Life
It is time to stand out?
From the inventor of cubism Pablo Picasso to Spanx founder Sarah Blakely, the people we admire most in the world are original, unique, different. They take risks, claim new ground. They do not fit in, they stand out.
And they do not compete for attention in the traditional sense.
Most of us are tricked into believing that achieving personal and professional success means fitting in. What it really takes is the courage to stand out.
In this dynamic, direct and succinct book, Lochhead and Clancy describe a research-based approach to thinking about your life and business called "category design."
Through a narrative stuffed with inspiring stories, they examine how legendary people — especially legendary entrepreneurs — introduce the world to new ways of thinking and solving problems.
They reveal how to exploit the exponential value of what makes you different vs. the incremental value of what makes you better. And they show how to conquer a marketcategory that you design, becoming its de facto queen or king.
About The Authors: Christopher Lochhead & Heather Clancy
Christopher Lochhead
Lochhead is multi-time #1 bestselling Amazon author, #1 charting podcaster, who is best known as a "godfather" of Category Design.
His books Play Bigger and Niche Down were the first on management discipline Category Design. His Category Pirates Series are #1 charting Amazon mini-books.
Lochhead is a dyslexic paperboy who got thrown out of school at 18. With few options, he became an entrepreneur, 3X Silicon Valley public company CMO, & advisor to over 50 venture-backed startups.
The Marketing Journal calls him, "one of the best minds in marketing", NBA Legend Bill Walton calls him a "quasar", The Economist calls him, "off putting to some", and Podcast Magazine calls him, "the best business podcaster".
Heather Clancy
Clancy is an award-winning journalist and #1 Amazon bestselling author specializing in transformative technology and innovation. Her articles have appeared in Entrepreneur, Fortune, The International Herald Tribune and The New York Times.
She was the launch editor for the Fortune Data Sheet, the magazine's newsletter dedicated to the business of technology.
As editorial director for GreenBiz.com, Heather chronicles the role of technology in enabling clean energy, sustainable business strategy and the low-carbon economy.
When she isn't writing, you can find Heather digging in her garden in Northern New Jersey, singing a cappella or scuba diving with her husband.
Highlights
Quotes
Most people and most companies are living inside someone else’s thinking.” — Bix Bickson2, aka the “Future Hacker,”legendary executive mentor
Those who follow the crowd usually get lost in it.” — Rick Warren, legendary evangelical pastor and author of “The Purpose Driven Life”
“Don’t strike while the iron is hot, make the iron hot by striking.” — W.B. Yeats, legendary Irish poet and Nobel Prize laureate
Michael's Highlights
There’s no such thing as a business that exists in a vacuum.
If you really and truly solve a problem in a new way or you solve a problem that people didn’t even know needed to be solved, then by definition the market is not ready for you. The market must be taught to accept you, and it’s your responsibility to be that teacher.
You can reposition and destroy your competition by exposing a problem your prospect couldn’t articulate or maybe even identify.From there, you show your customer — whether that customer is a consumer or another business professional — how you’re going to solve her or his problem. Niche down. Every market category works the way it does now because it got designed that way, either accidentally or on purpose.
Conditioning the market is the opposite of going to market. Going to market means playing by someone else’s rules on someone else’s playing field. The game is automatically rigged — anyone aside from the category queen is going to fail until someone steps in to design a new category.
Popular Among Kindle Users
Am I going to find my place in the world or make my place in the world?
Nellie’s wins by offering different pizza, not better pizza. No matter where your company is located or how big it is, when you position your business or yourself as “better” than some other option, you are invading someone else’s queendom. You are fighting for attention, messaging your mission according to someone else’s rules — a person or business that your customers already know. You’re playing a comparison game. And when two people say, “I’m the best,” by definition one is lying. Making it worse, the game you’re playing is a game invented by someone other than you. They set the agenda in the minds of the category. Not you. They frame the problem. They educate the world on how to solve the problem and what the product or service is worth. So, you will always be compared to “them.”
It comes down to leveraging the exponential value of what makes you or your venture “different” rather than leaning on the incremental value of what makes you “better.”
In any buying decision, humans need to know the category first, then they’ll consider the brand second. It’s how we make sense of the world.
And here’s the truth about the life: You can either position yourself or get positioned.
If you can articulate that problem clearly and offer a practical way to make it go away, people will demand the solution from you.
First, there is a known problem that gets reimagined and redefined.
Second, there is a problem we don’t know we have, that gets evangelized so well that it becomes a whole new market category.
Your level of success will seldom exceed your level of personal development because success is something you attract by the person you become.”
Conditioning the market is the process of teaching the market to think about a problem and a solution in a very particular way. Your way.