The biggest breakthroughs don’t come from creating more “useful”content. They come from owning an idea people can’t stop thinking about. Ambitious entrepreneur? Aim higher.

Success stories are really just stories from people who failed a bunch and didn’t give up Remember that

You don’t get paid for being the smartest or the best. You get paid for being known and trusted.

How to win the personal branding game In 2020: Be consistent. Make good content. In 2026: Become known for an idea you own. Different game entirely

You can publish 100 helpful posts hoping people eventually notice you. Or you can give them one idea that changes their thinking—and jump straight to the end of the ‘know, like, trust’ journey.

You can't own an idea people can't repeat 1. Name your shit (eg. frameworks, problems, philosophy) 2. Use brain-friendly naming techniques 3. Repeat them until they spread without you

The fastest way for an expert to build compound authority is to own one idea. (It’s simple. Definitely not easy though)

A strong idea can die in bad language. Sweat the words, yo.

This copywriting book costs $500 on Amazon. And one lesson inside it has easily made me 1000x that. It’s Breakthrough Advertising by Eugene Schwartz. It was written wayyyy back in 1966, and introduced a concept I’ve been obsessed with ever since: Enter: “The mechanism” Schwartz argued that every market gets more crowded over time. You must match your marketing message to your market’s stage of saturation. If you’re first in a new market, you make a claim and people buy. By stage 3 and 4, competition has exploded and everyone sounds the same. Buyers have heard the claim 100 times. They may have tried other solutions that didn’t deliver. They’re skeptical (and rightly so). Let me explain with an example: Think back to the golden age of fitness DVDs and how messaging evolved... Stage 1: first to market ↳ Just make a claim (eg. “Get fit without a gym”) Stage 2: a few competitors ↳ Make a BIGGER claim (eg. “Lose 30 lbs in 90 days from your living room”) Stage 3: lots of competitors ↳ Introduce a mechanism that explains how your product delivers on your claim (eg. Rapid weight loss in 90 days with P90X’s *muscle confusion* workout) P90X made a similar claim to the other fitness DVDs. But introducing “muscle confusion” as their unique mechanism gave skeptical prospects a reason to try it out. (Hands up if you bought—or seriously considered buying—a P90X DVD 👋) In saturated markets, it’s smart to introduce a mechanism. This is the exact thinking that pushed me all-in on “ownable ideas” a year ago. When I launched the original UNIGNORABLE Challenge back in 2022, it was still kinda novel for consultants and agency owners to create content personally. The topic of personal branding was juuuuust starting to get sexy. Now? Every second person on LinkedIn is a “personal branding expert.” Total market saturation. Shouting louder was never going to cut it. That led me down the winding path to making “ownable ideas” the centre of my work. Here’s where it gets brain-crunchingly meta: Your ownable idea can *ALSO* be your mechanism (aka: the reason a skeptical market believes your claim). Which means my mechanism AND ownable idea is... “ownable ideas.” I know. So meta. My brain hurt too. But it’s working. I’ve got a waitlist of people lined up to work with me (while charging 30X what they’d pay for most personal branding courses, cohorts, or communities.) There’s a catch, though. A big one. A mechanism only works long-term if it actually delivers. You can slap a name on anything and make a few sales this week. But if you can’t actually get customers better results, you’ll torch trust you can’t get back. Don’t do that. On that note, what’s your fav example of a product that introduced a unique mechanism?

If no pushes back on your big idea or says “wow, I never thought of it that way”… Keep iterating. It’s not ready yet. Today you’ve gotta earn people’s minds before you earn their dollars.

POV: Subject matter experts can build better AI tools than AI nerds Why? They can tell AI how to *think* about the problem and explain *why* a good output is good In the war against slop, that matters

Personal brand gurus: “Create useful content.” You: Cool. Wtf does that mean though? A quick scroll through your feed shows what passes for “useful” these days. > Memes > Rags to riches tales > Performative vulnerability And its works. Sort of... Big reach. Lots of likes. But those people are playing a different game than you... They’re playing the volume game. When selling a $399/year community or $79 software subscription, ya need lotsa eyeballs. But if you sell 5 and 6-figure service packages, you don’t *need* 100,000 followers to prove you know your sh*t. You probably need 12 people thinking “she gets my exact problem… I need to talk to her.” So what should you write about to reach actual buyers? The common advice is to choose your content pillars and stay consistent. So you pick 3-5 topics: marketing, mindset, leadership. Content pillars? ✅ But then stillllll have no f*cking clue what to write about. Because a bunch of loosely connected topics won’t give clients a good reason to choose you. A better option? Swap your CONTENT pillars for PROBLEM pillars. Start with a crisp sentence that describes what’s happening in your ideal client’s head right before they hire you. For me, it looks like this: “Help me become the go-to authority in my space so I can attract more clients now and build the leverage needed to scale.” Underneath it there are five deeper problems: → Clarity — they can’t name what makes them different in a way buyers care about care about → Compression — they can’t distill their expertise into a message that resonates and sticks → Courage — fear of judgment keeps them safe, quiet, and forgettable → Craft — they pour time and money into content and get nothing back → Commitment — they’re inconsistent, both with showing up and with their message And underneath each of these 5 high-level problems, there are layers of deeeeeper, even more specific problems. (One of those problems inspired *this* very post.) That’s the difference between a content pillar and a problem pillar. One gives you a broad topic. The other meets your buyer mid-thought so they lean in. And that “Whoa—are you in my head?” reaction is so powerful. Because when you describe someone’s problem better than they can describe it themselves, they assume you have the fix. That’s how trust gets built. Solve bigger problems. Earn bigger paydays.

Expert Entrepreneurs: When judgment is what you sell… how you think is part of what buyers buy You need more than a differentiated offer—you also need a differentiated perspective that establishes your authority

Ya know that weird skill that comes easy to you, yet other people seem to be shockingly bad at? That's your Zone of Genius If you want to win in business, build from there

Don't confuse *attention* with *intention* My feed is full of: > Memes > Ragebait > Inspiration porn > Performative vulnerability If you want to create content that gets clients—not just claps—you've gotta show people how you solve their specific problems too

Most experts never become authorities—or get paid like one—for one simple and avoidable reason: ❌ They never commit to a message or pivot too fast Authority compounds slowly, then suddenly fassst Commit