Agency

The first and most powerful step in reopening your creative channel isn’t learning a certain skill or uncovering a hidden talent. It’s just identifying—remembering, really—one important thing: YOU ARE CREATIVE.

Your only real control is to withhold your expertise. And although withholding expertise is the only leverage real experts have, it can be a powerful one, indeed.

The stopwatch starts when they decide to find a replacement for you, and it stops when they find one that meets their new standard. Boom. That amount of time is a direct measurement of how compelling your positioning is. If you are positioned well, then they find very few substitutes.

When I looked deeper into why that was the case, I discovered that they just had a swagger combined with a killer instinct. They had that certain confidence that some other firms lacked, and their success came in spite of their positioning and not because of it. Even more contradictory to my initial thesis is that these poorly positioned firms were

In a way, positioning is fake for a brief period of time. You’ve noticed just enough patterns to gain some credibility. Then you make the most of that driver’s permit to keep exploring, keep learning, and keep articulating insight. Eventually it feeds on itself and then you step into your expert clothes and really fill them out.

choosing the opportunities that allow you to compromise less and be more of an expert.