12 Notes

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"There are simply two kinds of music. Good music, and the other kind." — Duke Ellington

We are sorting creatures. We can't help it.

We put books in genres, songs in playlists, restaurants on lists, people into categories and camps. It's old survival wiring. Your brain hunts for patterns because patterns kept your ancestors alive, and when it can't find one, it builds one.

Categories help us find things, rank things, and guess how something will behave before we've met it. Birds fly. Fish swim. Drama’s make you cry, comedies make you laugh. We'd drown without them.

But somebody built those categories. And whoever builds the box we sort things into, controls the story of everything inside it.

The New York Times Bestseller List looks like a scoreboard of “hits”. But it's actually a designed, curated list with rules that can famously be gamed.

The Michelin Guide decides which restaurants count as world-class. A place without a star can serve you the best meal of your life and still sit outside the conversation, because it isn't inside the system that enables that type of conversation.

My favorite example. The Grammys used to give an award for Best Polka Album. Then one guy (Jimmy Sturr) won it 18 times. So the Recording Academy decided to retire the category.

Sit with that for a sec; Polka didn't die. The people who built and controlled the “Grammys box” you put Polka into, decided it should go.

That's the whole game in one story. The box is a choice someone made, for reasons that probably had nothing to do with you.

The definition of success in your field was written by someone too. An algorithm that delivers views. A platform that delivers audience. An awards committee. An industry that's done it “this way” since before you showed up.

Before you spend another year optimizing for that definition of success, it's worth trying to see who's designing the category-box people typically put work like yours into. Then asking whether you'd still do the work you do, once you see that clearly.

If your work fits a known box, the machinery knows what to do with it. It can shelve it, market it, fund it, recommend it.

If it doesn't fit, the machinery mostly looks past it.

Watch this in Hollywood. A film that can't be pitched as a known genre has a brutal time getting funded. The people writing the checks don't have a shelf to put it on.

The same thing happens to you and your work, all the time. The offer that's hard to explain in one line. The blog that's part strategy and part memoir.

If you're a consultant whose work is a little bit advisory and a little bit coaching and sits cleanly in neither bucket, you've felt it. The system doesn’t feel like it’s serving you, because it doesn't know where you go.

It feels like a flaw. I don't fit anywhere.

But land nobody can categorize is also land nobody else has claimed. There's almost no competition standing in it.

The catch is that uncategorized land is invisible. If the machine can't sort you, it can't find you either. So the real question is how to claim that open ground without also becoming invisible.

How can you cozy up to the right category that allows your work to be seen, while maintaining what makes your work truly unique.

Here's where Paul Simon comes back.

The unlock was never to break free of all categories. It's to see the category boxes clearly so you can remix a few the world already recognizes into a lane that's yours.

Innovation tends to live at the seams. Two unrelated worlds get pressed together and something new falls out.

Hip-hop met Broadway and you got Hamilton. Lin-Manuel Miranda didn't fight for a better seat in traditional theater. He built a room that didn't exist.

The legend goes that Miami Vice got greenlit on a two-word pitch. MTV Cops. A police procedural collided with a music channel.

None of those were new notes. They were new arrangements of notes everyone already had. And each one worked because both halves were well understood.

The audience knew hip-hop. They knew Broadway. The new thing was the combination, not the ingredients.

So look at the 2 or 3 worlds you actually live in with your professional work. Your craft. Your obsession. The weird side thing you're a little embarrassed to mention.

If the system of existing categories isn’t built for your work, remix.

Where can you cross-pollinate ideas to create something fresh?

One of the many things I loved about the show was how freely Paul Simon moved.

Folk to world music to a quiet love song, like the borders between them were never quite real.

Because to him, they weren't. They were rooms he could walk between, using the same 12 notes the whole way.

Most of us don't work like that. We pick a genre early, often without noticing we picked it, and then spend years trying to be the best version of a thing someone else defined.

We treat the box as the way the world simply is.

But it's a choice. Usually someone else's.

You don't have to burn the categories or boxes down. They're useful, and the world will keep using them with or without you.

But you can stop treating them as walls and start treating them as a map. A map of where everyone is already standing is also a map of where they aren't.

Instead of asking, “How do I make my work fit existing categories?” start asking, “What does the full grid of categories in my space really look like?”

Identify gaps between those categories that you can fill with your work, by blending things to create something new.

Cat Cafés. Silent Discos. Escape Rooms. Mobile gyms that come to your house… MTV Cops.

Use this to find the box you've been accepting, and the seam worth building in.

Copy + paste this prompt into your AI tool of choice:

Here are other ways I can help:

And I’d appreciate your help:

Both make a real difference.

Thanks for spending time with Red Threads this week, I’m glad you’re here.

~ Jaime