Stand The F*ck Out: The No-Nonsense Guide to Positioning Your Business, Finding Your People, and Building a Durable Brand

gather only insights from folks who have already invested resources in making progress.

When folks are buying stuff, they're not actively seeking out differences between them.22 Instead, they're focused on reaching a job within the specific context they find themselves in.

Second, when defining the job, resist the urge to mention specific solutions, technologies, or tools.

Open-ended questions like this invite detailed responses and uncover the “why” behind people’s actions.

The job is about your segment’s goals, not your own. It forces you to stop looking at your belly button and start looking at your people’s belly buttons.

To make a meaningful difference for a specific group of people so they pick you, the key is to identify struggles your segment really wants to solve but that alternatives don’t solve well or just ignore completely.

To get to the ignored struggles, we first need to know the exact goal the people in our segment want to reach (the job). This helps us find what’s stopping them from achieving it.

The key lesson here is that your POV must always be present. However, it shouldn’t be the main ingredient (like avocado cubes in a salad). It’s there to support whatever you’re putting out into the world.

Irrational struggles are the emotional and often subconscious problems that prevent a certain group of people from getting a job done.