80% of the world's wealth (not) inherited, SF Floppy Disks, Aristotle Category Designer, How to create a breakthrough, & Pirate Snacks

Thanks for reading.

Welcome to The Different Newsletter.

Musings for entrepreneurs, marketing leaders, and creators with a different mind.

From Christopher Lochhead.

Sponsored by Bad Tuna Industries.

You should read our real newsletter, not this one.

(And, if this is you’re first time here. I hope someone warned you).

(And please. Pretty please. With whisky on top. Get out of the passing lane.)

🏴‍☠️

80% of the world's wealth is (not) inherited.

When Joe Rogan said 80% of the world’s wealth is inherited, he lied.

(It always shocks me when people make shit up, and base an entire argument around something completely wrong. Especially something that you can look up in seconds on the Internet. 🤔)

• As of 2022, a majority of the world's 3,194 billionaires had earned their wealth themselves

  .

• The number of self-made billionaires (1,996) significantly exceeded those who inherited their wealth (317)

“Nearly 68% of the world’s richest people are ‘self-made,’”.

Of those with a net worth of $30 million or more, 67.7% were self-made, 23.7% had a combination of inherited and self-created wealth.

And only 8.5% of global high-net-worth individuals were categorized as having completely inherited their wealth.

Next time you consume media.

Remember.

Not all facts.

Are facts.

🏴‍☠️

“We cannot put off living until we are ready.

The most salient characteristic of life is its coerciveness: it is always urgent, "here and now" without any possible postponement.

Life is fired at us point blank.”

-José Ortega y Gasset

🏴‍☠️

SF Train’s Single Point of Failure

The San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency (SFMTA), claims to be the first US agency to adopt the train control system it currently uses.

It runs on floppy disks.

(They were invented right after fire was discovered. Think of “floppies” as cloud storage before the cloud storage category was a thing.)

The floppies have been part of Muni Metro's Automatic Train Control System (ATCS) since 1998.

For 26 years the good people of San Francisco (birth place of the semiconductor, and AI) every morning pray for floppies.

No floppies, no trains.

(Read that ten times.)

Jeffrey Tumlin SFMTA director, said because of the increasing risk from the floppies, there will be "a catastrophic failure."

"A catastrophic failure."

(Read that ten times.)

Michael Roccaforte, an SFMTA spokesperson says,

“initial planning for an overhaul of the ATCS, including moving off floppy disks, started in 2018 and was expected to take a decade from initial planning to completion.”

The San Francisco government is projecting it will take 10 years.

To get off the (fuckin’) floppies.

SpaceX's major accomplishments in its first 10 years (2002-2012):

• March 14, 2002: SpaceX founded

• March 24, 2006: First launch attempt of Falcon 1 (failed shortly after liftoff).

• September 28, 2008: Falcon 1 successfully reaches orbit, becoming the first privately developed liquid-fueled rocket to do so.

• June 4, 2010: First flight of Falcon 9 (successful).

• December 8, 2010: First flight of Dragon spacecraft, which orbited Earth twice before successfully splashing down in the Pacific Ocean.

• May 22, 2012: Dragon becomes the first commercial spacecraft to dock with the International Space Station (ISS).

• October 8, 2012: First operational resupply mission to the ISS (CRS-1), marking the beginning of regular commercial cargo services.

SpaceX’s is reported to be doubling it’s revenue every. And Payload Research projects SpaceX's revenue will increase to approximately $13.3 billion in 2024.

OpenAI's major achievements in their first ten years (2015-2025):

1. December 2015: OpenAI founded

2. April 2016: Released OpenAI Gym, an open-source toolkit for developing and comparing reinforcement learning algorithms.

3. December 2016: Introduced Universe, a software platform for measuring and training AI's general intelligence across various applications.

4. 2017: OpenAI's bot defeated professional human players in the complex video game Dota 2.

5. June 2018: Published research on "Improving Language Understanding by Generative Pre-Training," introducing GPT-1.

6. February 2019: Announced GPT-2, a more advanced language model (initially withheld due to concerns about potential misuse).

7. November 2019: Released the full version of GPT-2.

8. June 2020: Unveiled GPT-3, a significantly more powerful language model.

9. 2021: Launched DALL-E, an AI model capable of generating digital images from text descriptions.

10. November 2022: Released ChatGPT, based on GPT-3.5, which gained massive popularity.

OpenAI is thought to be the fastest revenue growing startup ever.

With reports indicating a 1,700% surge compared to the beginning of 2023.

Monthly revenue: In August 2024, $300 million. OpenAI is forecasting $11.6 billion in sales for the upcoming year.

(It’s tenth year in business)

But SF train leadership needs a decade to get rid of (fuckin’) floppies.

No wonder San Francisco is in the top 1% of crime.

And, no wonder (after spending $24 billion) the government of California made the homeless problem grow.

By 40%.

🏴‍☠️

How the Teachings of Aristotle Apply to Category Design

(By Kevin Maney & Mike Damphousse)

The concepts that make category design so effective are deeply rooted in human behavior.

They are timeless. 

Around 350 BC, in ancient Greece, Aristotle introduced the concepts of pathos, logos and ethos. His intention was to lay the groundwork for persuasive rhetoric. But centuries later, those ideas apply to the techniques used in strategic category design. 

A strong category point of view (POV), the cornerstone narrative of category design, requires more than facts and logic; it demands a deep emotional connection and credibility to truly shift markets.

By weaving ethos, pathos, and logos into a category POV, a company can create a compelling story that can move markets, capture imaginations, and establish new categories.

Pathos: Engaging Emotion to Drive Adoption

Pathos is about connecting emotionally with your audience, a vital component of category design. Categories are more than solutions to problems – they are invitations to join a movement.

This emotional connection is often the difference between incremental improvement and transformative change.

A successful category POV doesn’t just articulate a new way to do something; it awakens a deep-seated desire for change.

This is achieved by focusing on the villain – the problem that frustrates, angers, or even terrifies your target audience.

The emotional weight of the villain fuels the urgency to adopt the new category.

By understanding the pain, aspirations, and emotions of the target audience, a category designer can craft a POV that resonates deeply, not just intellectually.

Logos: Logical Justification for Category Creation

Logos represents the logical, fact-based appeal of your POV.

In category design, logos is critical for providing rational support for the problem definition and the proposed solution.

It answers the “why now?” question, demonstrating the market trends, technological advancements, or shifts in context that make the new category both relevant and inevitable.

A strong POV supports its claims with hard evidence – like market research, compelling metrics, and clear ROI.

Don’t overload your initial message with facts – as we’ve written before, emotion (or pathos) opens the door, and then logic (logos) seals the deal.

So use a rational backbone to ground the POV in reality, providing skeptics and early adopters alike with concrete reasons to believe in the new category’s viability.

Ethos: The Credibility of a Category Creator

Ethos refers to the credibility and authority of the speaker. Establishing credibility helps others believe what you’re telling them.

In the context of category design, it’s important to demonstrate that the creators of this category are uniquely qualified to lead it.

Build ethos into your category POV by positioning your company as the authoritative source of insight, innovation, and expertise in the new category.

A category-defining company isn’t just selling a product. It’s educating the market, challenging the status quo, and offering a vision of a better way. 

It signals that the category creator is not only trustworthy but also has the expertise necessary to guide the industry in a new direction

But don’t overdo the ethos.

If you do, the POV will feel more like a brand manifesto.

Remember, the POV is about the category, not the brand. 

Integrating Pathos, Logos and Ethos in a Category POV

Pathos builds emotional resonance, logos offers logical validation and ethos establishes trust. For a Category POV to succeed, it must lean on all three.

Without pathos the POV lacks urgency and emotional connection.

Without logos, it lacks rational justification.

And without ethos, it lacks credibility and connection to your company. 

Aristotle, it turns out, was more than a philosopher; he was a category designer as well.

Originally posted on CategoryDesignAdvisors.com

🏴‍☠️

How To Create A Breakthrough

All entrepreneurs, marketing leaders and creators must be able to create and recognize breakthrough ideas.

The question is — how do you set out to uncover the next great opportunity?

I recommend playing something called The Breakthrough Game and using the specialized Category Design Scorecard to recognize what works.

Together, these tools can help you move the world from the way it is, to the way you want it to be.

The Breakthrough Game

In 1895, The Campbell Soup Company had a breakthrough.

Campbell’s — and a chemist within the company named John T. Dorrance — came up with a radically different idea.

Canning was a popular method for sealing food.

And while soup was cheap to make (its primary ingredient being water), it was still heavy and expensive to ship.

Dorrance realized that if Campbell’s halved the water in each can, the business could produce and ship exponentially more soup.

Simultaneously, the company could drop the price of a can of soup from 30 cents to 10 cents, expanding both their distribution and lowering the barrier to entry for new customers in a way no other food production company had been able to.

As a result, Campbell’s invented the “condensed soup” category.

If you are a creator with an idea, an executive running a company, or an investor betting on the future, how can you do what Campbell’s did, today?

You can start with The Breakthrough Game.

Imagine for a moment you’ve just been fired from your company — whether it be a global enterprise or a garage startup.

No one is hiring.

You have a kid on the way.

And your only option is to create a new and different future for yourself.

Your mission is to create a new category or redesign the existing category such that you put your old employer out of business and you win.

To facilitate a powerful breakthrough brainstorming session, work through these 8 questions in order:

1. What does our business look like today? What’s happening in the world, and how might we expect the future to play out?

2. What business models do we believe will be most successful ten or twenty years from now?

3. What products will the world want based on all the new tailwinds in today’s economy?

4. What new category could we create that would inherently leave the old category to die?

5. What new and different future can we invest in that would fundamentally change the trajectory of our category and business?

6. What different future would crush your “old employer’s” category?

7. What are the 3–5 future scenarios that incorporate all of the above?

8. What must be true to believe in each scenario?

(See an in-depth example of how we work through these questions for an up-and-coming category as one of the Category Pirates.)

But how do you know when you’re looking at a category creator versus just another high-growth company fighting for market share in an existing category?

The Category Design Scorecard will tell you.

The Category Design Scorecard

The Category Design Scorecard gives you a good sense of how relevant you or your company will be 10 years from now.

We created this scorecard at Category Pirates after reviewing companies from the Fortune 100 Fastest-Growing Companies list and analyzing their 10Ks, Annual Reports, Investor Presentations, and Investor Relations websites.

Companies were scored in five key areas on a 0 to 2 scale: 0 being the company does not successfully accomplish each area’s goal, 1 being the company partially accomplishes the goal, and 2 being the company successfully accomplishes the goal.

Here’s a quick overview of each area:

• (Area 1) Category POV: Does the company have a clear “Point of View” of their category?

• (Area 2) Future Category Reimagined & Without Compromise: Does the company cast a compelling future — free of the fundamental problems, compromises, and trade-offs inherent to the category?

• (Area 3) Radically Different Offer + Business Model: How does this new category get delivered to the customer, both through a breakthrough product/service/offer, but also through a breakthrough business model?

• (Area 4) Data Flywheel: Does the company generate data about customer/consumer demand/preferences that creates a unique opportunity and advantage to anticipate the future of consumer demand and any category shifts?

• (Area 5) Depth & Degree of Customer Outcomes: Does the company generate satisfied/ecstatic customers/consumers

Companies tend to cluster into 3 buckets:

1. Be The Winner: These companies believe strategy = competition. (Think: Xerox. Delta Airlines. Ford.)

2. Be The Best: These companies want to be seen in the market as having the best product or the best technology. (Think: Intel. Pepsi. Verizon.)

3. Be Different: These companies are the true category designers that end up writing or rewriting the rules of the game. (Think: Tesla. Airbnb. Picasso.)

Using The Category Design Scorecard, companies on the Fortune 100 Fastest Growing list fell into three groups.

• 60% of companies on the list scored 0 to 2, and were much more focused on “beating the competition” than innovating or creating something entirely new. These “compete to win” companies fight for existing market share.

• 20% of the companies scored 3 to 5, and were more focused on “being the best” within an existing category — not “being the leader” of a new category.

• The final 20% of the companies scored 6 to 10, and were companies clearly trying to design/create a new and meaningfully different category.

What was striking to discover, however, was the three-year stock price growth for each of these types.

To see the results and learn how to score companies, dive in to The Category Design Scorecard.

🏴‍☠️

Shalom my Pirate friend,

Christopher Lochhead

👊🏴☠️🙏

Read Category Pirates next.

(Our real newsletter)

The creator of this Different Newsletter failed cutting & folding in kindergarten.

People who subscribe on substack get this Different newsletter first.

Hikers spot mysterious spear-wielding ‘wolf man’ in German mountains

Do not drive EV or ICE vehicles and/or operate heavy equipment within 12 hours of consuming this (experimental) newsletter.

Oregon man paddles pumpkin 45.67 miles to break world record

This Different Newsletter is intended to be consumed with libations.

The stuff in this (experimental) newsletter that sounds nuts, ill-conceived &/or poorly written… I did that on my own.

(Probably after an IPA and a bourbon, and a…)

That said,

Most of the ideas, research, frameworks (and even big chunks of the writing) are as a direct result of (or completely lifted from) my partnership with Eddie Yoon & Katrina Kirsch 🏴☠️ …aka

Category Pirates 🏴☠️

German pizza joint also delivers coke. Cocaine that is.

Penicillin was first called “mold juice.”

(Very bad category design)

In 1897, the Salvation Army developed the first "Salvation Brigade," which collected and resold items to fund their charitable work.

This led to the creation of the "family thrift" store category.

A man in Germany received 217 COVID-19 vaccinations

Before acting on anything you just read please contact your lawyer, doctor, message therapist, marriage counselor, accountant, yoga instructor, chiropractor, bar tender, bud tender, butcher, spouse, partner, category designer and mommy.

There are (random) strategically placed spelling, grammar and formatting mistakes in this newsletter.

(It’s a feature, not a bug.)

If you think Taylor Swift is breeding giant sharks with lasers on their heads to take control over beaches, then consider these strategic mistakes part of a secret code that unlocks Federal Government servers in Bumsquat Youdaho to the files that prove the The Statue of Limitations was created by alien garden gnomes.

If you’re not a Taylor Swift sharks person, the errors herein exist because Lochhead is lazy… and wants to write in an unfettered, real(ish) time way and an editor would slow the roll.

He’s also gifted with 4-5 learning differences.

That make spelling fuckinf hard.

Even with spell check.

Can you spell AC/DC?

Please.

Pretty please.

Subscribe here to keep getting Different.

World’s tallest teen

On average, humans produce between 500 to 1,500 milliliters of gas daily, resulting in about 10 to 20 farts.

Some studies suggest that healthy individuals “pass gas” 12 to 25 times a day

Are you allowed to talk about farts in a business newsletter?

I don’t think so.

Never seen farts in the Harvard Business Review.

Ya and lochhead has written for HBR.

Well sure, but not about farts!

The Innovator's Dilemma is one of the most revered business books of all time. Clay Christensen is an intellectual giant

And.

Innovator's Dilemma is deeply flawed.

Read The Innovator's Delusion

The Pistol Shrimp, measuring only about 2 cm, is the loudest animal in the world.

It can snap its claw shut so quickly that it creates a bubble that produces a sound reaching up to 218 decibels, louder than a gunshot.

Drunk Naked Florida Man Found Sitting Inside Garbage Can

Contrary to Internet rumors, “The Economist” is not the secret funder or publisher of this Different newsletter.

(We are in no-way associated with “The Economist”.)

Eddie Van Halen was right.

Bigfoot spotted in Missouri.

The weirdest thing about stripping naked with 5,500 people?

Substack is saying this newsletter is too long.

How judgey.

Ya.

You’d think they’d encourage more writing.

Ya.

We need more smart people writing.

You know what we really need?

What?

More smart people making more smart people.

That’s right.

Why does it seem like the stupid people are (way) out breeding the smart people.

I think dumb people have more sex.

Really?

You’re making that up.

No I’m not.

I heard it on Joe Rogan.

Rogan!?

Joe Rogan is a dumb person’s idea of a smart person.

That’s right!

And probably the reason Rogan says so many nice things about dumb people….

Rogan wants dumb people to feel good about themselves.

Dumb people don’t know their dumb.

As a matter of fact, most dumb people think they are smart.

Ya.

That’s (a big part of) what makes them dumb.

Hey, speaking of dumb.

Who are we talking to?

We?

I’m sitting here by myself.

Reading to myself.

Ya, but I’m right here with you.

Is this newsletter making us talk to ourselves again?

Yes it is.

Why does he make us do this all the time at the end of this newsletter?

I don’t know.

It’s unprofessional

And you’re not here.

I’m by myself.

There is no one else here.

Well, then who are you talking to?

Can a newsletter make you crazy?

This one can.

😎

Subscribe here to keep getting Different.

Subscribe to this (very) Different podcast too.

Read this book too.

Thanks for hanging out for the pirate snacks at the end.

All Different newsletters contain nuts.

Sponsored by Bad Tuna Genital Wipes (TM).

Let’s hang out again soon.

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