Category Design Tip: Want To Create Net-New Value? Be A Missionary (Not Mercenary)
Category Design Tip: Want To Create Net-New Value? Be A Missionary (Not Mercenary)
Missionaries create new things. Mercenaries fight over old things.
Dear Friend, Subscriber, And Category Pirate,
This week’s Category Design Tip forces you to look in the mirror and reflect on very important questions.
Do you fight over old things or create new things?
Do you capture value or create it?
Are you a mercenary or a missionary?
Let us explain why your answers matter to the world.
To chart your own category course (our mini-books are the best maps!), hop aboard The Pirate Ship and subscribe below:
Missionaries vs Mercenaries
Every entrepreneur, executive, creator, marketer, and investor falls into one of two categories: mercenary or missionary.
Mercenaries:
Fight over old things
Have secrets, and build in stealth
Fight over market share
Capture value
Mercenaries seek to protect their every advantage because, on some level, they understand they are playing a game of stealing resources, not creating net-new resources.
Missionaries:
Create new things
Have no secrets when it comes to their vision for the world
Believe their mission is greater than market capitalization
Stand in the new and different future they want to create
If you are a missionary, the future happens because of you. You created it. You birthed it. And because you created it, and you educated others on the importance of it, you changed the world.
Mercenaries Capture Value. Missionaries Create Value
Missionaries serve a higher purpose that usually has to do with creating abundance for people in the world who were previously ignored, forgotten, misunderstood, or improperly valued.
Ebay values your “junk” properly.
YouTube values your opinions and ability to entertain and teach regardless of your “actual celebrity” or credentials.
Airbnb and Uber value the trapped value in your home and car.
Zillow measures the value of your home.
Fiverr values your skills as a freelancer.
Substack creates equal opportunity for anyone who writes to capture the value of their work.
All of these companies help billions of people recognize they are far more valuable (and have access to far more value) than just what the world says they are valued. They help billions realize one man’s trash is another man’s treasure and help reveal the abundance where many others before them only saw scarcity.
And it makes all the difference in the world.
To truly be a missionary, your pursuit has to be about so much more than creating for the sake of business success and profit.
Saying the words, “We are on a mission to change the world” is not what matters.
What matters is what truth you are in service of, and the lengths to which you are willing to go to educate the world about that new and different future you believe matters.
So ask yourself:
Are you invested in a mission worthy of your potential?
Does it matter enough to you to spend 20 years doing it?
Would you consider it your life’s work?
Is it worth investing a meaningful percentage of your life into?
Now, you may be wondering, “How do I actually ensure that I’m a missionary and not a mercenary?”
There are many ways to be a missionary, but we outline three ways to provide the most value in our mini-book Missionaries vs Mercenaries: Are You Competing Or Are You Creating?
Become A Category Designer
Want to unlock 50+ mini-books on Category Creation and Category Design, and receive new mini-books straight to your inbox?
Hop aboard!
Arrrrrrr,
Category Pirates
PS: Don’t forget to grab a copy (or gift!) of one of our best-selling books:
❄️ Snow Leopard: How Legendary Writers Create A Category Of One
⚒️ The Category Design Toolkit: Beyond Marketing: 15 Frameworks For Creating & Dominating Your Niche
PPS: Sign up for (or share) our free email course:
🏴☠️ The 7-Day Category Accelerator course walks through the fundamentals of Category Design and gets you up to speed quickly, so you can start “thinking different.”