Scan time: 2-3 minutes / Read time: 3-5 minutes
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Hello rebel ideapreneurs 🦸♂️🦸♀️
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🙋♀️ Maya’s newsletter that sounds like everyone else’s
Maya is a project manager who writes a newsletter for new team leads on the side.
Every issue is correct.
And every issue sounds exactly like the three other newsletters on the same topic.
So she narrows her topic again, and it still sounds like everybody else.
🧩 Her struggle:
She keeps narrowing her topic, when the topic was never why she sounds the same.
Then a reader forwards her the true story of a man
who also had to decide how narrow to go, and refused to pick one subject,
and built a business that made more than $4 million in a year.
And he’s the only person who works there.
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✍️ The man who refused to pick one thing
Dan Koe writes about business, mindset, and about creativity, all mixed together.
That’s exactly what every expert tells you not to do.
He runs a one-person business with no employees.
He’s said publicly that it made more than $4 million in a year.
The advice he was ignoring goes like this.
Pick one narrow topic, and become the person everyone thinks of for it.
His objection is practical.
A narrow topic is really just a list of questions people ask.
A list like that is easy to copy.
Ten people can write the same list.
Now a machine can write it in an afternoon.
So the topic was never what made anybody hard to replace.
Get this — what Dan sells is not information about business.
It’s what business looks like through the eyes of somebody who also thinks constantly about creative work and about how people think.
You can copy every idea he has.
You cannot copy his mix of business, creative work, and how people think.
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🔥 The recipe
➡️ The Point of View Advantage
Dan put three different subjects together and created a unique business.
This move is called The Point of View Advantage.
He didn’t find a topic nobody had taken.
He put together things nobody else happened to love at the same time,
and that combination is the part that can’t be copied.
So you stop hunting for a topic nobody has taken, because there are none left.
Your mix of obsessions is the one thing nobody can copy.
Not another person, and not an AI.
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🛠️ Maya’s turn
Back to Maya, whose newsletter for new team leads sounds exactly like the three others on the same topic.
That evening, she runs the prompt at the bottom of this email,
and tells it the three things she’s obsessed with, including the one she keeps out of her writing.
Her AI sidekick comes back with one clear answer:
Stop narrowing your topic, and mix your three obsessions into every issue,
starting with board games, the one you keep hiding.
That night, she starts next Sunday’s issue over.
This time, running a weekly team meeting is explained like the rules of a board game.
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🌅 Four months later
Maya still writes for new team leads, on the same topic as before.
Now every issue has a board game in it somewhere.
Twice as many people read it now,
and readers write back to say it’s the one newsletter they forward to their team.
Your topic doesn’t need to get any smaller.
It needs the things only you care about.
Write your three obsessions down and mix them.
That’s it, my fellow anti-status-quo-ers!
Yours ‘helping you skip years of pain and frustration in your life and business’ Vijay Peduru 🦸♂️
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🏄♀️ The prompt
The prompt below finds the combination you already have and shows you what your ordinary
topic looks like when you mix your other obsessions into it.
🧰 What you’ll need
The topic you write about now, and what the biggest names in it sound like
- e.g. managing people for new team leads, and they all sound like HR handbooks full of bullet pointsThree things you’re genuinely obsessed with, work or not, and the one you keep out of your writing
- e.g. long-distance running, city planning, board game design, and I keep board game design out because it feels unseriousA question you get asked all the time
- e.g. “how do I run a team meeting people actually want to come to?”
🚀 How to run it
Open your AI sidekick, ChatGPT, Claude, or whichever one you use.
Swap the three examples, the text inside the curly brackets, for your own, then run it. If your AI sidekick can already see your notes, you can run it as is.
🧪 Want to test it first? Run it without changing anything, and it will use the examples.
CONTEXT:
- Use my own material first. If you can see my drafts, my sent issues, or my subscriber dashboard, pull the real details from there instead of the examples below.
- If you know how I write, use my voice. Otherwise, write in a clear, warm, no-jargon voice — first-person, plain words, no startup-speak.
- If you know who my readers are, write for them. Otherwise assume people who were just made team leads and were never taught how to manage people.
- If I have replaced the examples, use only mine. If an example is still there, fill it in from what you already know about me, and mark it as your assumption. If you don't know anything about me yet, use the example exactly as written.
- Do not suggest a narrower niche. That is the move this is replacing.
=============== INPUTS — edit these, or just run as is ===============
The topic I currently write about, and what the biggest accounts in it sound like:
{e.g. managing people for new team leads, and they all sound like HR handbooks full of bullet points}
Three things I am genuinely obsessed with, work or not, and the one I keep out of my writing:
{e.g. long-distance running, city planning, board game design, and I keep board game design out because it feels unserious}
A question I get asked constantly:
{e.g. "how do I run a team meeting people actually want to come to?"}
======================== END OF INPUTS ========================
Outputs:
1. My actual combination — named in one sentence, using my obsessions, not my topic.
2. The one that does the work — which obsession is furthest from my topic, and precisely what it lets me see that the big accounts cannot.
3. The rewritten answer — answer the constant question, filtered through all of my obsessions at once, as one piece rather than one section per obsession.
4. Five more like it — titles only, each one impossible for anyone without my exact mix to have written.
5. The tell — what a reader would say about my writing after four issues, if this is working.
Then name the ONE obsession I should stop hiding, and where it goes first.