Mark Levy

High up on a wall in my neighborhood gym, there’s a sign that reads:

“What Doesn’t CHALLENGE You Won’t CHANGE You.”

It’s the only permanent sign inside the gym, so you’d guess its message is important. It’s one whose wisdom the gym owners want stamped into people’s minds. And it’s painted in giant letters.

Which makes what comes next even stranger.

Gym-goers walk past that sign all day long without noticing it. Trust me, I’ve asked. Of the ten people I’ve quizzed, seven didn’t realize a sign was there at all, and the other three couldn’t recall what it said. (One did say, “It’s something about challenging yourself.”)

How could such a big sign be so invisible?

The sentence is loaded up with the negatives “doesn’t” and “won’t,” which slows comprehension down. The real problem isn’t the negatives themselves. It’s that the sentence has to be mentally flipped into a positive before it makes sense. That’s asking way too much.

What could the sign have said that would’ve been easy to absorb while you’re panting between sets? Here are a few that wouldn’t need conceptual translating:

No challenge, no change.

Struggle builds strength.

This is supposed to be hard.

Discomfort’s the point.

This is how folk wisdom catches on. Not because it’s smarter, but because it’s sayable. Everyone knows the idea behind “What you focus on grows.” But imagine if it had arrived as, “What you do not focus your attention on will not meaningfully improve for you.” Same idea. Dead on arrival. Wisdom spreads when it can be carried easily, especially by tired, distracted people. If it needs translating, it doesn’t travel.

There’s a reason slogans are simple. Nike didn’t say, “Consider the possibility of action.” They said Just Do It. Apple didn’t say, “We value creativity and nonconformity.” They said Think Different. Mel Robbins didn’t say, “What you don’t need to control in others won’t ultimately affect your well-being.” She said, Let Them.

Simple language sticks. If the message matters, make it impossible to miss – especially if your reader has just done five sets of box jumps.

Years ago, when I first started speaking professionally, friends told me I needed a lead magnet after my talks. Something simple. So I wrote this brief guide. At the end of a speech, then, I’d tell the audience that if they wanted a digital copy of “33 Questions to Business Differentiation,” all they had to do was hand me their business card and I’d send it along.

And damn if the guide wasn’t good! You really can uncover a true point of differentiation by following the advice and answering the questions. More than one person has told me that a single question in this guide changed how they talk about their business.

33 Questions to Business Differentiation

In the world of business, standing out isn’t an option. It’s essential. If your offering sounds like thousands or even millions of other offerings, you’re not giving the market any reason to choose you over your competitors.

To make your offering a success – be that offering a consulting project, product, service, book, or speech – your work needs to come across to the market as not just good, but different. What’s more, that difference can’t be trivial. It must have substance.

To help you create significant differentiation for your firm, or for any one of your offerings, I’ve compiled a list of questions that may lead you to the differentiation you’ve been searching for.

Using the list

Below, you’ll see 33 questions. Don’t try answering all of them at once. As a matter of fact, you may only need to answer a few. What you should do is this:

Read through the list. One question will jump out at you. That is, when you read it, you’ll feel the itch to answer it. Go ahead. Answer it.

Open your computer to a blank document or take out a pad and pen. Spend as little or as much time answering the question as you’d like. I’ve seen people take as little as a few seconds or as much as forty minutes to answer a single question.

When you’ve answered that question, again scan the list and see which question intuitively hits you next. Answer that new question. And so on. Keep going.

After an hour or so, put the list away and come back for another session later in the day, or even a few days later.

Once you’ve put in significant work, read over everything you’ve written and underline any ideas, words, phrases, and stories that strike you as promising. Does a single differentiating idea stand out, or can you string together a series of thoughts that lead to a differentiating idea?

If yes, think about all the ways you can use that idea to differentiate your firm and thought leadership pieces. If not, keep answering questions until a differentiator appears.

If you haven’t discovered a differentiator on your own, call upon a small group of your most trusted advisors, and share the best pieces from your written exploration. These advisors might help you see that you’ve already created a differentiator of potential.

A final note: On the list you’ll notice a few questions with a negative slant, such as “How might some of your pet business ideas be wrong?” The reason? I’ve found that when we approach a problem-solving situation from one vantage point only, we get stuck. By thinking about what we don’t like and where we might be wrong, we create room in our minds to mull over interesting ideas we wouldn’t have considered before.

The 33 Differentiation Questions

• Why did you begin your current business?

• Who is your ideal audience?

• How is your ideal audience different from other audiences?

• What can a member of your ideal audience do once you’ve worked with them that they couldn’t do before?

• What does your ideal audience need to hear from you most?

• What makes you the perfect person to deliver your work?

• What about your work is obvious?

• What about your work is surprising?

• Who admires your work, and why do they admire it?

• Whose work do you admire, and how have they influenced you?

• What business ideas do you most envy?

• What client problems do your competitors solve that you don’t?

• What are your pet business ideas, and why is each important to you?

• How might some of your pet business ideas be wrong?

• How does your work make a difference to others?

• How does your work make a difference to you?

• What part of your business do you most enjoy?

• What part of your business do you hate?

• What moments in business have made you most proud?

• What moments outside of business have made you most proud?

• What are your favorite business stories?

• What is the worst advice about your topic you’ve ever heard?

• What do you know about your topic that others don’t know?

• What do you know about your topic that others may know, but haven’t thought to say?

• What obstacles have you overcome?

• What are your weaknesses, and how might they be turned into strengths?

• Where in business have you shown courage?

• Where outside of business have you shown courage?

• What two changes would make the biggest difference to your business?

• What part of your work is underappreciated?

• What part of your work brings the most compliments?

• What is the greatest work-related compliment you’ve ever received?

• Over the next three years, if you could only teach your audience about one idea, what would that idea be?

I created a sales technique called the existential close.

Now, I hate sales techniques. At least the kind that box people into a corner. The only techniques I like are the ones that make things clear and help people come to a fair decision. I’m very open.

Sometimes I’m talking to the leader of a billion-dollar product manufacturer. Other times I’m talking to someone thinking carefully about their own personal brand. The stakes are different, of course, but they’re experiencing the same human moment. They’re hesitating. If that happens, I’ll sometimes say something like this:

“You don’t want to do this until you’re ready. That makes sense. But there are a few things you should know.

“I’m really good at what I do. Differentiation is my craft. And the fact that you found me at all is wild. There are eight billion people on the planet. That you found me, decided I might be able to help, and reached out defies the mathematical odds.

“You might be thinking, ‘I can always do this later. There might be a better time.’ Maybe. But just because I’m here now doesn’t mean I’ll always be here. I might have a stroke. I might have an accident. I might decide to leave this field and do something else. I might decide to quadruple my fees.

“You just don’t know.

“What you do know is that I’ve already demonstrated I can help you in a meaningful way. You’ve said that yourself. And just because the opportunity exists now doesn’t mean it will exist later. If you walk, that’s not a neutral choice. It’s a gamble.”

I didn’t learn the existential close in any sales manual. I’m not trying to scare anyone. I’m not talking about their mortality. I put it all on me. I’m just naming something true about the human condition: things change, people disappear, and windows close.

Whatever they decide, I’m at peace with it. I told the truth.

William Friedkin was a young director still trying to figure out who he was. By 1970, he’d made a handful of films across very different genres, none of them quite connecting. One of them was “Good Times,” a lightweight movie starring Sonny and Cher. Friedkin later said he was so embarrassed by it that he wanted to buy up every existing print and destroy them.

In other words, he didn’t have a style. He was trying things, missing, and running out of runway.

Around that time, Friedkin was dating the daughter of Howard Hawks, which gave Friedkin access to one of the great American directors, a man who had made “Sergeant York” and “The Thing from Another World.” According to Hollywood lore, Friedkin asked Hawks what he should do next.

Hawks didn’t talk about grand visions. He said something much more blunt and tactical:

“People like car chases. Make the best one anyone’s ever done.”

Friedkin later clarified that Hawks may not have said those words exactly, and that the famous chase in “The French Connection” emerged from his own work with collaborators, not from a single piece of advice. Fair enough. But the story has endured because it captures what Friedkin actually did next.

He didn’t try to announce who he was as a serious filmmaker. Instead, he focused on doing one thing extremely well. “The French Connection” became the third highest-grossing film of 1971, won the Oscar for Best Picture – and featured what’s still considered one of the greatest car chases ever put on screen.

That chase didn’t just impress audiences. It shocked them. By getting one defining moment irrefutably right, the rest of the film was judged through that lens.

This is the power of creating something – not balanced and mundane – but unbalanced and unforgettable. It’s the restaurant with a decent menu that becomes legendary for a single, astonishing dessert. It’s the otherwise prosaic pop song that becomes a stadium anthem because of one killer hook.

So when I’m stuck on a creative project, I forget balance. Instead, I ask myself, “Where is the car chase here? And how do I make it as killer as humanly possible?”

Since I was a teenager, I’ve had what doctors call a benign familial tremor. My hands shake, sometimes violently. As I’ve gotten older, it’s become more pronounced. It doesn’t really affect my overall health. I’m not dying, at least not any more than the rest of us are. But it has changed my relationship with magic in a very real way.

Because of the shaking, it’s hard for me to hold objects, much less perform intricate sleight of hand. The number of secret methods I can personally execute is small. If I focused only on the techniques my hands allow, my world as a magic creator would be painfully narrow. I might as well shelve my interest in the art form altogether.

So I don’t start there. I start with the miracle; what magicians call the effect; what the audience sees, hears, and experiences. That choice opens things up. It gives me a far larger universe to work in, instead of one that’s reductive and endlessly familiar. Only after I know the miracle do I concern myself with how it might be done; what magicians call the method.

On one level, I know this is just a story about magic tricks and tremors. Things not everyone finds especially important. But for me, it points to something broader. I need to keep creating, whether that’s writing, magic, or jokes, regardless of whether anyone is asking for them or rewarding them. Making things, for me, is not optional. It’s maintenance.

I’m not a religious man, but there’s a line from the Gospel of Thomas I’ve always found hard to ignore: “If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.”

Not bringing forth what you’re meant to bring forth has consequences. I’ve felt them.

In 2013, my black cat Jinx died of cancer. He was about seventeen.

One of the things I remember best about him were his visits while I was writing. I’d be in my home office, working away at the keyboard of my Mac, lost in thought. Jinx would sit in my lap, or curl up on the desk and watch me. Sometimes, though, he’d do more than observe.

He’d walk across the keyboard, his paws striking keys and leaving marks and spaces where I never intended any.

Instead of getting annoyed, I was always delighted. I’d look at what he’d typed and secretly hope he’d created some thread of meaning, even if by accident. I suppose I was hoping for a real-life version of the idea that a hundred monkeys, pecking away at typewriters, might eventually produce “Hamlet.” That never happened. Still, I thought enough of Jinx’s contributions that over the years I copied and saved the lines he created, including the ones that blended with a word or two I had written myself.

I kept them in a document called “Jinx’s Typing,” and I decided to publish it here. He produced these lines over the course of a few years, though I’ve laid them out as a single poem. Then I wondered whether Jinx was a poet at all, or whether these were really individual stories. That’s why I ended up calling it “The Collected Works of Jinx.”

Of course, he’s not the only animal said to have produced “work.” There are elephants who paint, for example.

When I look at these lines now, I find myself glancing down at the keys and picturing him again, adjusting the pressure of his paws, choosing where to step.

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7

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One of my clients is a prominent internet information-product marketer. He sells digital products and coaching to people on his email list. Like many in that world, he tests ideas before building them, so he doesn’t spend months creating something no one actually wants.

He sent his list a survey asking about their interest in a topic: how they’d prefer to learn about it and what they might be willing to pay. At the end, he asked, “How much would you pay for a course by me on Subject X?” The choices were $497, $297, $197, and $79. Overwhelmingly, people chose the cheapest price: $79.

So he spent six weeks creating the course and offered it at $79. The result was no sales. Not one.

After the fact, he said to me, “I realized my survey never gave people the option of saying zero dollars. As in, ‘I’m not interested in your proposed course, no matter what the price.’” He had assumed interest. His audience didn’t. Faced with the options he gave them, they chose the one closest to the answer they actually wanted to give.

I see this kind of thing all the time. We assume that what matters to us must matter to the other person. It doesn’t. People can look at the same information and come away with completely different conclusions. You see it every day if you read the comments on a post you feel certain about. What seems obvious to you lands very differently for someone else.

That’s why in persuasion situations I often do something simple. Instead of guessing what someone finds important, or asking them to speculate about the future, I ask them about the past.

When I’m talking with a prospect, I’ll say something like, “Tell me about a time you made a similar decision.” Then I mostly listen. What was the situation? Who else was involved? What information mattered? When did they know it was the right call?

Only after that do I ask, “What can we learn from that?” (And, yes, I ask them that question overtly.)

I’m not trying to manipulate anyone. I’m trying to understand how they think. I’m building a working model of how to talk to them in a way that actually makes sense to them. For example, I myself need vivid detail. If someone stays high-level with me, I shut down. I need to experience the thing being sold.

The person you’re trying to persuade has preferences, too. So if you’ve got a conversation coming up where a decision matters, try asking, “When was the last time you faced something like this? How did you decide?”

They already know how they make choices. You don’t have to guess. You just have to ask.

In October of 2024, I delivered a talk for TEDxCapeMay. The title I gave it was “Your Secret Is Obvious,” although the powers that be at Big TED later changed it to “Using the Obvious to Stand Out in Life and Business.”

The final talk landed well. But a week or two before I gave it, the opening was far different.

At first, I thought I needed to explain what I do for a living before telling the audience why paying attention to difference matters. When I practiced the talk with a few friends, they told me I didn’t need credentials. Standing on the TEDx stage was credential enough.

If you watch the talk on YouTube, you’ll hear the opening I ultimately used. What follows below is the original opening I discarded.

I still like it. The idea that I’ve built a career around looking for and working with differences still strikes me as wild. Like I’m some character out of “Gulliver’s Travels” or a Donald Barthelme short story.

The Original Opening

I have one of the strangest jobs you’ve ever heard of. When I tell people what I do for a living, they often say, “How did you get a job like that?”

What I am is a differentiator. It’s part business strategy, part marketing. My entire job is predicated on difference. That’s what I do all day long. I look at differences.

I’ll look at a company, or a product, or a service, or a cause, or a political campaign, or a streaming show, or whatever I’m being asked to look at, and I’ll say: “Here’s what’s different about this right now. Here’s what we could make different if we wanted to. And here’s the most important difference of all. This is the difference that will separate you from your competitors and make the world want to deal with you.”

How many of you knew this kind of job existed? Crazy, right?

Now, there are lots of ways to stand apart. It all depends on what you’re trying to make distinctive.

You might do it through a unique philosophy. Or a backstory that explains why you do what you do. Or by choosing a particular segment of the market. Maybe you’re for the wealthy. Or maybe you’re for the underdogs. Depending on which part of the market you specialize in, you’ll show up in the world in a very different way. And the options here are nearly endless.

But here’s the important thing you need to know. You must do something to stand out. You don’t have a choice. The world has eight billion personal brands, hundreds of millions of company brands, and each of us is exposed to hundreds of marketing messages every single day.

So if you don’t stand out, it doesn’t matter how good your work is or how worthy your cause is. You’ll get lost.

Your point of differentiation can be based on something profound, but it needn’t be. I mean, look at the Leaning Tower of Pisa. When it was built, there was a flaw in its foundation, and the tower unintentionally leaned about five degrees. Instead of being a problem, that flaw turned the tower into a sensation. Today, tourists travel to Pisa just to see it. It draws about five million visitors a year and generates roughly $23 million annually. And that’s after more than 850 years. Why? It leans.

Take away the lean and you take away the attention, the tourists, and the money.

Trust me. Whatever it is you do, you need a lean. Very often, that lean comes from something imperfect, something you didn’t design on purpose, something buried in the foundation. But if you know how to work with it instead of fixing it, that’s what makes people pay attention to you, or your company, or your product, or your cause.

Magicians have been performing magic tricks for thousands of years. If I asked you to guess how many tricks have been created — in all of recorded history — you’d likely say hundreds of thousands or millions. And you could make a case for such lofty numbers.

But in a very real sense, the number of tricks created, now and forever, is capped at 19. Why a figure so small?

In 1944, a semi-professional magician — who also happened to be an engineer — named Dariel Fitzkee published a book called “The Trick Brain.” In it, he condensed every conceivable magic trick down to 19 basic plots. Plot #1. An object could appear. Plot #2. An object could disappear. Plot #3. An object could change places with a second object. And so forth. Up to 19.

If you look through the eyes of Fitzkee the engineer, magically producing a coin falls in the same category as magically producing a 700-pound tiger. They’re both appearances or materializations. To create a new materialization trick, all you’d have to do is materialize an object of a different type.

And magicians have. Through the years they’ve magically produced billiard balls, blocks of ice, bricks, cockroaches, doves, fighter jets, helicopters, macaws, playing cards, rabbits, sand, snowflakes, streamers, water, whiskey, and umbrellas. They’ve produced a lone human as well as a crowd.

So how does a magician decide what to magically produce?

If the magician is smart, they base their choice on meaning. And I’m not talking about what’s most meaningful to the magician. I’m talking about what’s meaningful to the audience. The magician needs to see through the audience’s eyes.

A 20th Century performer, Henning Nelms, calls this idea “The Ham Sandwich Theory.” He says if a magician magically produces a ham sandwich from your previously empty jacket pocket, at first you’ll be amazed but that amazement will die out fast, because the trick has no point. A sandwich? What’s that got to do with anything?

But imagine that same sandwich materializing in your pocket after you told the magician you’re starving. What would your reaction be then? Oh my gosh, a miracle! You’ll eat the sandwich, your hunger will fade, you’ll tell everyone you know, and you’ll remember the moment for the rest of your life.

All because the trick had a point. All because it had meaning — from the audience’s perspective.

Basing a trick on what the audience finds meaningful is such a powerful strategy that famed magician, David Blaine, used a version of the sandwich idea to close his first TV special.

On a Manhattan sidewalk sat a destitute man holding a takeaway cup of coffee. Blaine bent down, whispered a few magic words, and the coffee inside the cup seemed to bubble and transform. Into what? An overflow of silver coins. The man on the sidewalk, overwhelmed by his good fortune, began singing and praising the lord.

The trick was mystifying, for sure, but in the end its power came from having a point. It was ABOUT something.

Blaine could have chosen to magically fill the man’s cup with a thousand different things: acorns, feathers, gyroscopes, marbles, push pins, soil. But the sudden appearance of any of those objects would have constituted mere spectacle. What the impoverished man could really use was a cup spilling over with money. And that’s what he got.

The illusion was predicated on deep wish fulfillment.