Category of One
Combine your top-20% skills into a new category instead of competing in a crowded one
- Difficulty
- Advanced
- Time to result
- ~months to results
- Steps
- 4
- Confidence
- 80%
Category of One is a positioning strategy for generalists. Rather than trying to be the best in a crowded existing category, where you face a red ocean and a race to the bottom, you aim to be the only. The mechanism is to overlap several skills where you are merely top-20% into a Venn diagram no one else occupies, creating a new category you can own. Ferriss anchors it in Blue Ocean Strategy and the law of category from The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing: create new categories instead of fighting for share in saturated ones. Once you have defined the category and positioning, you work backwards from it to build the product or career. He adds a counterintuitive corollary: aiming for home runs is often less crowded than aiming for base hits, because so many people underestimate themselves.
Origin
Extracted from Modern Wisdom episode 780. Ferriss cites Blue Ocean Strategy and the law of category from The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing as sources.
Core principles
- 01Aim to be the only, not the best, in a crowded field.
- 02Overlapping several top-20% skills can create a category no one else occupies.
- 03New categories beat dominating existing ones with a race-to-the-bottom dynamic.
- 04Work backwards from positioning to design the product or career.
How to run it
- 1
Inventory your top-20% skills
Identify the handful of domains where you are strong but not world-class, roughly top 20%.
- 2
Find the unoccupied overlap
Look for a combination of those skills, a Venn overlap, that no one else is putting together.
Pro tip A dish of one ingredient is predictable; combine fifteen and the outcome is an outlier no one can copy.
- 3
Define a new category
Frame that intersection as a new category to create rather than an existing crowded one to dominate.
Watch out Competing to be the best in a saturated arena invites a race to the bottom with no moat.
- 4
Work backwards to the product
Start from the positioning and reverse-engineer the product, career, or offering that fills the category.
Pro tip Consider aiming for home runs; they are often less crowded than base hits.
In the wild
Ferriss describes himself as top-20% in several things rather than world-class in one. By overlapping skills such as writing, interviewing, self-experimentation, and audience-building, he positioned himself as a category of one rather than the best in any single crowded field. When told in 2014 that podcasting was already saturated, he still found an uncrowded high-leverage angle, deconstructing world-class performance, that no one else was combining the same way.
→ A defensible position as the only, not the best, in an otherwise crowded space.
Common mistakes
Fighting to be best in a red ocean
Entering a crowded category and trying to out-execute specialists produces a race to the bottom with no protective margin.
Crowding the base hits
Because so many people underestimate themselves, the modest goals are actually more crowded than the ambitious ones.
Is it for you?
Best for
Generalists and creators who are top-20% in several areas but world-class in none.
Not ideal for
True top-1%-of-1% specialists whose single superpower already wins a defined field.
From the transcript
“I'm trying attempting to be the only and not the best.”
“It's often less crowded to aim for the home runs than it is to aim for the base hits, because so many people underestimate themselves.”
From the episode
The Lessons, Hacks & Books That Changed My Life - Tim Ferriss - #780
Tim Ferriss