My Spiky POVs
Earlier this year, I joined Generalist World (a thriving global community of boundary-defying thinkers and doers) and took their Unboxed course. It sparked so many fresh ideas and also forced me to swing a wrecking ball at decades of assumptions and stale perspectives. As a result, I’ve been in rebuild/reformulate mode for a minute. Deep learning can have that effect on me (and perhaps you’ve felt it too?). It’s exciting yet supremely unsettling to uncover new truths that make you reconsider everything you thought you knew. Life is like that—sucking up new knowledge highlights the vastness of all there is yet to learn.
One of the lessons in Unboxed was around The SPOV, or Spiky Point of View. It’s an idea popularized by the brains behind continuing education co. Maven, Wes Kao. SPOVs make me sweat a little (in the best way) because they’re meant to invite controversy and discussion. Here’s a snippet of how Wes describes SPOV: “A spiky point of view is a perspective others can disagree with. It’s a belief you feel strongly about and are willing to advocate for. It’s your thesis about topics in your realm of expertise.”
This hits home for me, pinging against a current ache I’ve been feeling in my core. Maybe you’ve asked these same questions of yourself, particularly at a certain point in your life. Am I special? Unique in any way? How am I different and how can I possibly stand out in a roomful of polished professionals? A sea of qualified candidates vying for that one job? Here’s another piece of it for me, as a woman. It can be difficult to transition from decades of youthful allure to a period of middle-aged motherhood. If that was part of what made you feel “special,” then all your self-definitions are a bit haywire.
Enter the SPOV. As Wes sees it, “Each person has a unique way of seeing the world.” Ah, refreshing. This is not attached to your physical presence, nor to your professional accomplishments. It’s something more intrinsic, innately worthy.
“It’s what separates you from everyone else. It’s the culmination of your experience, skills, personality, instincts, and intuition. These factors have molded you into the person you are today,” writes Wes.
When you can articulate your SPOV, you become uniquely positioned. “Your spiky point of view showcases how you approach your craft. It shows why you make the decisions you make. It shows you’re thinking rigorously and interpreting what’s going on around you.”
Perhaps what’s most compelling to me about formulating my own SPOV is Wes’ final point: “A spiky point of view is almost impossible to imitate. It’s unique to each person, which is why it’s such a powerful competitive advantage. It’s rooted in your conviction and authenticity.”
After an intense period of thinking, reading and reflecting, my SPOVs poured out of me in an effortless flow. In my list, I see themes grown through a lifetime, in and out of weeks and over years, drawing from my experiences as a marketer, a storyteller, a writer, and as an individual devoted to deep human connection and empathy above all else.
For me, the most difficult part is making my SPOVs public. But now I’m ready—and so curious to see what reactions arise from my personal truths. I cannot wait to get the discussion started.
Each of these short statements comes from years of professional experiences and observations, and they’re meant to be directionally representative rather than all-encompassing. They’re a starting place that distills my core perspectives.
In coming weeks, I’ll flesh out these SPOV snippets to offer a deeper look into the thinking and experiences that helped me arrive at these understandings of the world as we know it now, and how it will be in the future.
This is me building in public with you. It’s an exciting (and a bit scary) liminal space (those fuzzy places in the middle between here and there—doorways, tunnels and bridges to the future).
You might be able to get an idea for how many of these SPOVs build on each other, giving you a peek into my overall logic and thinking. These are the broad strokes, the bold outlines, and next I’ll be filling in the vivid details that make the ideas more real and real life.
What do you think? Do you agree? Disagree? What are your SPOVs?
My Spiky Points of View
1. The majority of your customers exist in the future – most of your customers aren’t ready to buy from you most of the time
2. Marketing IS education, not selling
3. Brands are publishers – and need to structure their organizational design accordingly
4. The future of corporations is to become media companies, utilizing proprietary data inaccessible by traditional newsrooms, leveraging tremendous journalistic talent from news outlets struggling to monetize their efforts via the old advertising model
5. Content creation – aka publishing – is a cross-functional discipline, not to be siloed within any single department, such as marketing or site
6. Stories are the currency of trust between brands and customers
7. The people who own the future are the ones who tell the most resonant story
8. To heal our fractured world, all we really need is one great story that most people feel is true, can believe in, and see themselves as part of its unfolding
9. Emergent thinking and working beat top-down vision-casting every time
10. He or she with the best deck wins, the one that gets re-shared and gains life beyond the original creator
11. Trust is the most lucrative business asset in an AI, tech-driven world, more so than efficiency, automation or individual genius
12. Growth and change are possible at every age and stage, assuming personal desire and nourishing relationships
13. Exercising your own creative force on your own terms is the ultimate growth engine
14. Reading is rocket fuel for your growth engine, paired with meaningful conversations
15. Humans > AI
16. Chasing weekly stats is like a dog chasing its tail – instead, think in months, plan in years and dream in decades
Yes, I did check out the large print edition from the library. It was glorious.
Learning from Louise
I just inhaled Louise Erdrich’s most recent novel, The Mighty Red. It wasn’t until I read the acknowledgments (one of my most favorite parts of any book) that I had any inkling the town where the characters lived was a complete fabrication. That’s how masterfully true Erdrich writes. Her rendering of place and people is so vibrant, so complete, so utterly, breathtakingly loving and empathetic, that it’s all unquestionably real. Reading this book, you come to know the topography intimately, you feel each of the characters on a soulful level.
While The Mighty Red is not a romance, it is a reflection of the wholeness of life itself, and so of course it contains a gorgeously lush and quirky love story. Hugo and Kismet are meant to be together, “They were sure that in other forms and other lives they’d met in Pembina, which attracted a lot of Michifs even as the fur trade faltered,” Erdrich writes as the two are tossed together after a year apart. “How else to explain why through the years they kept circling back to each other?”
Much earlier in the novel, when Hugo and Kismet are freshly in love yet torn apart by circumstances, he compares himself to a hopelessly devoted dog. How achingly true, how universal and yet so minutely individual.
6 More Reasons I Recommend The Mighty Red
It’s a ghost story. I’ll say no more about that because it might ruin a late reveal in the novel, but it has some well-placed spirits.
It features bank robbery. Non-violent crime of the best possible sort.
It makes sugar beet farming fascinating. Erdrich uses this one agricultural niche as a microcosm for what’s gone wrong ecologically. Here’s a compelling passage about, of all things, weeds: “In some places, lambsquarters is considered the Prince of Greens, one of the most nutritious greens ever analyzed; it was one of the earliest agricultural crops of the Americas. It also resembles amaranth, but the brothers rarely spoke of that. The rough-cut men were preparing to eradicate one of the most nutritious plants on earth in favor of growing the sugar beet, perhaps the least nutritious plant on earth. Evolution thought this was hilarious.”
It’s a love letter to humans. Every single character is drawn with careful attention to detail, with not just empathy for their flaws, but with brushstrokes that paint the weak spots as beauty marks. Her lesson seems to be: If you accept other humans, you have to accept them in all their awful (and awe-ful) messiness. No judgment.
The river is a character. More than a backdrop or a sensory detail, the mighty Red River shapes the landscape and the story in irrevocable ways.
It shows the shape of family. Mothers and children, husbands and wives, brothers, lifelong neighbors. Thrown together by geography and blood, they’re connected by silvery threads that shift and weave, tangling together so that when one snaps, another holds.
