Daily Creative · Action Guide · Episode 130

Be Singular in the Face of the Singularity.

In the early 1960s, a lanky high school kid in Medford, Oregon, was losing at the high jump. I mean... losing bad. He was awful. Every serious jumper around him used the same technique, called the "straddle", and Dick Fosbury simply could not make it work.

So, one day he decided to try something different. He turned his back to the bar and went over headfirst. A local paper compared him to a "fish flopping in a boat". His coaches told him to stop doing it. Officials even checked the rulebook to see if he was cheating.

And, five years later he won Olympic gold in Mexico City. Today, that technique called the "Fosbury Flop" that everyone laughed at is the only way anyone jumps.

Fosbury didn't win by simply doing the standard thing better than everyone else.

He won by doing the thing that was his and his alone, and holding onto it long enough for the world to catch up.

To be frank, I believe that is the whole game for you and your team right now.

Competent is now completely free. Tools that write, design, analyze, and compose are in the hands of every person in your organization and every competitor you have. The baseline of "good enough" is generated instantly, everywhere, all the time.

AI is the ultimate "cover band". It has learned every song ever written and will play any of them on request, in any style, at any tempo.

If what you or your team produces is merely competent, you are standing in the middle of that collapse, and no amount of speed will get you out of it.

What the tools cannot do is write your song. They cannot stand on the stage of your life, with your scars and your convictions and the specific people you serve, and say the thing only you have earned the right to say.

The way through is to become singular, to make work that could not have come from anyone else and therefore could not have come from a machine trained on everyone else.

Cover bands don't change the world.

That starts with voice. Voice is the first principle of VERVE, the framework at the center of my new work The Infinite Lever, and it rests on five things I first wrote about in Louder Than Words.

They're listed below, and they comprise every resonant, effective voice and piece of work.

If you lead people, there is a harder version of this. Your team's voice is a reflection of what you reward.

If you reward fast and generic, you will get work that sounds like the tools. If you reward precise and risky, the kind of work that costs something to make, you will build something no competitor can replicate by signing up for the same software you did.

The question I would put to your next leadership meeting is this: Which of our recent work could anyone have produced, and what would it take to make it unmistakably ours?

For your own work, here's the question: Could anyone else have made this? If the answer is yes, go back to it. Find the place where it stops being a cover and starts being your song.

Knowing the five elements is the easy part. The Action Guide is where you put them to work. It takes about five minutes to read, and it is built for you to hand to your team. Feel free to share.

This week's Action Guide

Inside are six practices you can finish before the next episode, including a twenty minute exercise to name your pillars and a test to run on the work you are closest to shipping.

There are also four questions to sit with on your own, four more to bring to your team, and a space to write down the one step you will take this week and who you will tell about it.

Print it, or forward it to the people you lead and work through it together.

Fosbury spent four years looking foolish before anyone cheered.

Most of us will not get the gold medal moment, but we will get something better: a body of work that could only have come from us, made for people who needed exactly that thing. That, friends, is worth the risk.

It's not what you know, it's what you do with it that matters. Hit reply and tell me which practice you are going to implement, or which question landed hardest. I read every response.

Until next time, may you be brave, focused, and brilliant.

Todd

P.S. Know a leader who needs this one? Forward it along. They can get the Action Guide for every new episode at toddhenry.com/start.