The number of hours I spend consuming should never equal or exceed the number of hours I spend creating. - Nicolas Cole

If everyone in your category is writing restaurant reviews as if they’re formal essays, something “unexpected” would be to write comedic restaurant reviews from the perspective of a part-time food blogger named Cindy who works for a failing restaurant magazine, and shows up to every restaurant pretending to be this hot insta-famous food-review writer but actually doesn’t know anything about food and gets too drunk at every tasting (and it shows in her writing). In the professional-restaurant-review category, this would be “unexpected.” And as a result, it would stand out.

The entire — and I mean this quite literally, the ENTIRE — art and business and “game” of online writing is rooted in understanding what category you’re actually competing within. Unless you can consciously name the category, you will never have a firm grasp as to whether your work is “Better” or “Worse” than the competition. It isn’t until you understand the category, and see “The Ladder” that exists within your category, that you can begin climbing your way to the top.

Here’s an example of the 1/3/1 + Bullets structure from my article, “5 Serious Things You Should Know About Money Before You Turn 30.” Money, and “financial freedom,” is a skill. No one ever tells you what you should know about money when you’re young. There isn’t a class in high school, or even college, where a professor sits you down and says, “Now listen up: mastering money is no different than learning how to shoot a basketball or paint a picture. It just takes practice.” Instead, money remains (for many people) this massive unknown in their daily lives. They don’t know how to make more of it. They don’t know how to spend less of it. They don’t know how (they’ll ever) save it. And they don’t know what to do with it once they have it. And that’s a big problem.