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Own Your Impact equips experts and leaders to transform their expertise into meaningful influence. Host Macy Robison reveals how successful thought leaders use deliberate systems—not luck or volume—to amplify their authentic voice and create lasting impact. Through practical frameworks and strategic guidance, you'll discover how to build a self-reinforcing ecosystem of Core Resonance, structured Content, a Central Platform, strategic Connections, and intentional Commercialization. Whether you're just starting to share your expertise or scaling an existing platform, this podcast delivers the roadmap to turn your ideas into purpose-driven influence that resonates far beyond what you might imagine possible.
Welcome back to own your impact. I am Macy Robison, and if you have natural contrarian thinking that questions assumptions everyone else accepts as truth, this episode is for you. You have a bold, distinctive voice that stands out from conventional approaches. You see possibilities others miss entirely, and you're energized by creating new paradigms, rather than just improving existing ones. But here's what might be most frustrating,
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you get a lot of advice to follow proven formulas when your entire purpose is creating something that doesn't exist yet, or you have tried to take your big ideas and push them through existing, proven models to get the word out about what you do, and it just doesn't land the way you hoped. Now, if you're listening and some of this resonates, but not all of it, I actually want you to know this, even if this isn't your primary archetype, it's called category creator. If it shows up in your profile when you take my quiz, you probably recognize some of these feelings. It feels like an internal alarm system that goes off when you try to do things the conventional way, even when that way is working for everyone else, you might start to follow standard business advice. But there's always this underlying sense that something doesn't quite fit. You find yourself asking, but why does it have to be that way when everyone else seems perfectly content with how things are done with the status quo, that friction isn't something to push through. It's valuable information about how you're wired. So if you want confirmation about your archetype, whether it's category creator or whether it's near the top of your scores, we'd love to have you take the thought leadership archetype quiz at Macy robison.com forward slash quiz. I was working with a client that kept saying she was undefinable in her approach to helping business owners. And it wasn't that she was undefinable, it's that she was trying to force herself into existing categories and relying on traditional marketing tactics to get the word out about what she was doing. And it was completely draining her energy when we looked at her archetype results, category creator was at the top, and everything clicked into place. All the things that she was trying to do in this well established field made sense because of that shift.
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Because here's what I see about what energizes category creators. You see fundamental flaws in how things are currently done, and you have a visionary perspective that allows you to imagine an entirely different approach that you know in your gut will work. You're not being contrarian for the sake of being different. You genuinely see a different way, a better way that doesn't seem to exist yet, and you're willing to stand alone with that new idea, because you can see the paradigm shift that is needed, but what feels draining is these incremental improvements to systems when you can see revolutionary possibility. Following industry standards feels limiting and outdated, and being asked to conform when you know there's a better way forward can be really frustrating.
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This is why traditional thought leadership advice sometimes fails you, or platform building advice, there's no existing roadmap for what you're creating, and you're literally trying to use a map for a territory that hasn't been explored yet. So Seth Godin, here's an example. Didn't just improve direct marketing. He created permission marketing as a completely new category, and if you look at how he operates as a public figure, as a thought leader, he's got a completely different approach than most people have. I recently started following a really great sub stack by Katrina gazarian. She is an HR leader. She created Game Day HR with the sole purpose to change the way the world thinks about HR human resources. And she's really working with the companies that she guides to redefine what it can be. Instead of it being a cost center that sucks up resources, it can become a profit driver, and I love the way she's thinking about that. But for both of them, the map to get the word out about how they're doing things differently didn't exist, you've got to build that map. So here's how you get results. If you're a category creator, stop trying to fit into existing categories. Start defining your own. The fastest way to do that is by articulating what's broken about current approaches in your field and what you're creating instead your foundation priorities are your core resonance, really understanding and owning your contrarian perspectives as your competitive advantage. It's who you are, it's how you express yourself. It really encompasses the experiences that you've walked through, and you have the courage to walk your talk and embody all of that in really powerful ways, and your content developing, paradigm shifting, IP ideas, apps, processes that define your new category, rather than trying to improve existing solutions for your platform. Approach your positioning should signal that you're not following conventional approaches. Think manifesto centered content that explains your new way of thinking, or case studies that demonstrate why your approach works better than existing alternatives. This data.
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Branding that feels completely different from industry standards. The way you connect with others, the way you build an audience, should create discussion and debate. That's how new categories get established. Bring your point of view to the table, cultivate early adopters among people who are frustrated with conventional approaches, and have those strategic conversations with other innovative thinkers who can help amplify your message. But here's a mistake that sometimes might cost you those early adopters. You don't need to soften your contrarian perspective to appeal to more people. Your edge is what makes you valuable. You need to demonstrate value and results, though, not just be different for difference sake. You do need to become a really powerful magnet by using the language the point of view that you do have to attract the right people while very strongly repelling the wrong ones. When it comes to business models, you should have premium positioning based on category ownership. When you create a new category, you get to set the pricing standard. You're not competing on existing market rates because you're creating a new market. Consulting that helps organizations implement your new approach, training that teaches others your revolutionary methodology, certification programs that establish your new category. One of my favorite examples of this that I stumbled across earlier this spring is a sub stack called category pirates. They have worked in corporate worked in innovation in Silicon Valley, creating new categories, new ways of thinking about markets, and they have a lot of great content about how to create intellectual property that makes you a category of one. I've loved learning about some of their stuff. It goes hand in hand with a lot of the things that I'm teaching. And they themselves are walking their talk by creating this sub stack to get the content out. They're not just creating an online course because, I mean, they could have but that's not category creating. They've instead flipped a lot of how sub stack works for them on its head, and have created a really valuable, really useful set of educational materials to get people thinking differently about the uniqueness that they bring to the table.
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And it's an expensive sub stack. It's not $7 a month. The main level, I believe, is $200 a year, and then there's a level above that. So their pricing for people to be able to define what they do in real attention grabbing substantive ways, that's a huge paradigm shift, and that's valuable. So price for the paradigm shift in the category, innovation you provide, creating a new category, is valuable work, and that's one of the things I've learned from reading their sub stack. We value what happens in Silicon Valley, because they've been able to create entirely new categories that weren't there before. And in the thought leadership space, Seth, Godin, alt, MBA, for example, that wasn't even competing with traditional MBA programs on price or in structure. It was a completely different approach to business education, and though it wasn't expensive, as expensive as an MBA, it still commanded premium pricing because it created results that traditional approaches couldn't deliver in a timeframe that a traditional approach couldn't deliver. So here's what you can do to take action on this. Write a one page manifesto that clearly articulates three things, what is fundamentally broken about the current approaches in the field that you're in, what you're trying to create instead, and why this new approach is so necessary now, especially in your first draft, don't worry about being diplomatic or appealing to everyone. Your contrarian perspective is your competitive advantage. Own it. This manifesto, this draft you're going to write can become the foundation for everything else you build. Category creators often have some complex archetype profiles because they're naturally boundary crossers, so when they're paired with other things, like Resident orator or strategic advisor, that can really create some interesting color to some of the other things we've talked about in these episodes, and understanding how having category creator as a secondary as a third score influences your approach is really crucial for building something sustainable and building something that feels like you. In my live workshop beyond your primary archetype, I analyze these unique combinations in ways that are only available to workshop attendees and my clients. And if you took the quiz and your top score was transformational guide and you see category creator in the square breakdown near the top, this deeper analysis could be especially valuable for understanding how to build around your strengths. So register at Macy robison.com, forward slash workshop, and remember, your job isn't to fit into existing categories. Whether you're a category creator or not, you're a category of one, your job is to fundamentally redefine existing categories or create new ones that serve people more powerfully.