Oh boy, is today’s feature a humdinger…

And you’re going to want to grab a cup of coffee and sit down for this one because we’ve truly handed over the reins here to illustrate the point in the best way we could:

Getting YOUR point of view across in a way that’s authentically, well…you.

And our esteemed guest? Folks, meet Jeremy Byars, a man we’ve come to both respect and cherish because his perspective is absolutely spot on.

Jeremy is the current CMO at United Systems, a US-based utility software and metering company, and some of our readers may know him as “Jeremy from the chat” from any number of major virtual conferences.

He has many accolades (from teacher and poet to marketer and contrarian thinker), so it’s, honestly, been tough to even write this intro.

But what he DOES have (in spades, might we add) is a unique perspective. And that unconventional path is exactly why he's the right person to write this insanely valuable piece for us.

Jeremy is also a mensch! Having met someone and considering them somewhat of a friend from only two or three conversations is a rare feat.

So, with that in mind, if you’re looking for some perspective on establishing your unique point of view, read this!

We tend to create our own misery when considering the next piece to write.

You have an idea, you start turning it over in your head, maybe you even get a few sentences down, and then the inevitable question arrives:

“Hasn’t somebody already said this?”

You know that the answer is “probably.”

And suddenly, a fresh circle of hell is formed. There are only so many times you can stare at a blank content calendar before wondering whether every useful thing about your topic, your industry, or your niche has already been written somewhere. Covered many, many times over, in fact.

Once you start thinking that way, originality begins to feel like a ridiculous and impossible standard. It starts to seem as though having something worthwhile to say requires discovering some untouched corner of your subject that nobody else has noticed yet.

But that’s not really how originality works.

Mark Twain once described ideas as pieces of colored glass in a kaleidoscope: the pieces themselves may be old, but we keep turning them into “new and curious combinations.”

That’s a far more useful way to look at originality. Having an original point of view doesn’t mean having an idea no person in the history of the world has ever had before. More often, it means taking an idea people are already familiar with and filtering it through your own experiences, observations, mistakes, frustrations, interests, and biases.

Nobody else has quite that combination. And the longer you work, the more distinctive that combination becomes.

Work anywhere longer than a week or so, and you’ll accumulate an eclectic collection of experiences. We’ve all had different bosses, coworkers, customers, successes, failures, projects, hobbies, obsessions, and moments when something went so badly that it permanently changed how we approached the next thing.

Those experiences shape how we see our work, even when the connection isn’t obvious. A childhood hobby might affect how you think about competition. A bad manager might change the way you communicate. A previous job in a completely different industry might make you more sensitive to customer frustration.

I’m one of the most nontraditional marketers you’ll find. I spent three years in customer service and another three in inventory control before taking on my first true marketing/communications role.

As a result, I’m likely far more empathetic to customer frustration than folks who’ve been in marketing their whole careers, and more sensitive to the operational realities behind the promises we make than someone who’s never dealt with inventory shortfalls or purchasing snafus themselves.

On paper, those roles may have little to do with my industry or my job as a CMO. But they have quite a bit to do with how I think about our customers, the promises we make to them, and the availability of our inventory.

We tend to discount experiences like these because our own lives feel ordinary to us. We were there for all of it, so of course we know the things we know and notice the things we notice.

But our own experience isn’t some universal baseline. The jobs you’ve had aren’t the jobs everyone else has had. The customers you’ve talked to aren’t the customers everyone else has talked to. The campaigns you’ve watched disintegrate before your very eyes aren’t the campaigns everyone else watched fail miserably.

All that shapes our judgment. The challenge may not be developing a perspective at all. Most of us already have one.

The harder part is recognizing that the way we see something isn’t automatically obvious to everybody else.

“Everyone knows that” is usually a bad assumption

One of the strangest things about getting better at something is that your own expertise becomes harder to see. You learn enough over time that certain observations become automatic, and eventually you start assuming they’re obvious.

I’ve heard people say some version of “everyone knows that” immediately after making a genuinely useful observation. I’ve done it, too—in my head and to others. But often what we really mean is, “I know that because I’ve spent years thinking about this.”

Those aren’t the same thing.

If you’ve reviewed thousands of emails, you probably notice things almost instantly that someone newer to the work still has to consciously look for. Maybe you’ve learned that the campaigns everyone internally loves aren’t always the campaigns customers care about. Maybe you can tell when a CTA is competing with the rest of the message or when a campaign is trying to do three jobs at once.

After you’ve seen something a thousand times, it stops feeling insightful. To someone seeing it for the third time, though, it may be exactly what they needed someone else to articulate.

I was once working through a communications problem with a department head trying to figure out how to say everything that needed saying without making their meeting impossibly long.

I said something I’d internalized years earlier while figuring out poetry (yes, I’m a poet, didn’t you know it?): The job of a piece of communication isn’t always to contain every piece of information. Sometimes it’s simply to get someone to the next place.

She stopped me: “Wait. Say that again.”

I remember being almost confused by the reaction. To me, it wasn’t a framework or a particularly original insight. It was just how I thought about the work. But she made me repeat it so she could write it down.

That moment sticks with me because, let’s be honest, it was an honour to have someone literally write down something I said. What a feeling!

But it also made me wonder how many useful things we never say precisely because they no longer feel novel to us. I didn’t come up with the idea. I’d heard versions of it before.

That’s why I’ve started thinking, “Has anyone said this before?” is probably the wrong question. The answer is quite likely yes.

A better question is, “Have I actually said what I think about it?”

The first sends you searching for proof that your idea has never existed before, which is a fool’s errand. The second forces you to clarify your own judgment, which is far more likely to produce something worth reading.

We have an almost infinite amount of information available. If you want 25 subject-line tips, lifecycle best practices, testing frameworks, segmentation ideas, personalization strategies, or content-planning advice, you can find them.

Producing another competent explanation of one of those subjects isn’t particularly difficult, either. What becomes more interesting is the interpretation layered on top.

Tell me what you tried and what surprised you. Tell me which “best practice” sounded like a slam dunk but ended up an airball from half-court. Tell me what you used to believe and no longer believe because you tried something, failed at it, or got a result you didn’t expect. Tell me what your industry seems obsessed with that you’re increasingly convinced matters far less than everyone says it does.

That’s where your point of view starts to emerge.

Consider the difference. “Here are five email personalization tips” gives me information, but so can an LLM or a search engine.

“I think marketers dramatically overestimate how much personalization customers actually want” gives me something to think about.

And this part is super-duper epically important: you don’t have to be universally correct. Your observation doesn’t have to be universal to be useful.

Publishing an opinion doesn’t mean carving it into stone and declaring it true for every person in every situation forever and ever, amen. You’re allowed to say, “This is what I’ve seen.”

Someone else may have seen something different, and that’s actually fantastic. Now there’s a conversation!

One of the great byproducts of experience is that absolute opinions become harder to maintain.

I can believe data is incredibly valuable while also believing marketers sometimes hide behind it. I can believe testing matters without believing every decision needs a test, which really shouldn’t be a scandalous notion.

I can believe AI will fundamentally change content creation while believing a recognizable human point of view will become more valuable because of it. I can believe consistency matters while acknowledging that sometimes the best decision requires ignoring the playbook.

Audibles can be your friend. Those tensions don’t always need to be resolved. In fact, that’s often where the interesting stuff lives.

Early in my career, I was a rules hardliner. If X happened, you did Y. It was clean, repeatable, and reassuring—and honestly, that’s still my instinct.

But since then, I’ve watched colleagues across multiple industries and roles ignore certain rules and get better results than the “correct” approach probably would have produced. I’ve also watched essentially the same decision fail spectacularly.

The rule wasn’t wrong, and breaking it wasn’t secretly the better rule. Context mattered in ways I hadn’t learned to see yet.

The longer you work in a field, the more the tried-and-trues start developing asterisks. You see enough exceptions, unexpected outcomes, and situations where two seemingly contradictory things somehow turn out to be true that your thinking naturally becomes more nuanced.

In fact, that evolution is itself a useful perspective. Think about what you believed three or five years ago that you’d now heavily qualify. Think about advice you once repeated confidently that now comes with several disclaimers—or that you’ve thrown out completely.

That doesn’t mean you had nothing useful to say before. It means you kept paying attention.

This may be a sidebar, but I’m no fan of the phrase “thought leadership.” It doesn’t do us many favors.

For a lot of people, it sounds enormous. We picture conference stages, bombastic entrance music, and people confidently explaining the future of an industry—a future that is, seemingly, always already here. It sometimes feels like thought leadership is reserved for people with “visionary” in their bio, or at the very least an acronym for a job title.

But you don’t need to predict the future or have your own walk-up music to contribute something worthwhile. Sometimes you can simply notice something.

Any one of those can be the beginning of a useful piece of content because a point of view isn’t universal law. It’s an invitation for someone else to consider an observation, compare it with their own experience, and decide what they think.

When we run out of ideas, our instinct is usually to look outward. We search Google, ask an LLM, thumb through industry publications, scroll LinkedIn, check competitor newsletters—basically, we find out what everybody else is talking about.

There’s nothing wrong with any of that, but there’s a major downside to doing it first: you start filling your head with everybody else’s interpretation before you’ve clarified your own. Then you sit down to write and wonder why everything in the draft feels vaguely familiar.

So before researching, spend a few minutes asking yourself what you already believe about the subject and why. What happened that gave you that opinion? Where have you seen conventional wisdom fall short? What frustrates you about the topic? What does everybody seem to misunderstand? What would you say privately over lunch that you might feel strangely reluctant to put in a newsletter or post on social media?

And always, always, ALWAYS ask one follow-up question: What story immediately comes to mind?

Your stories are your content fingerprints.

Five unrelated people may all believe brand voice matters. But one might have learned it after watching a technically flawless campaign get rejected because leadership said, “This just doesn’t sound like us.” Another may have learned it because customers suddenly started replying once the company stopped polishing every sentence to death. Someone else may have spent years writing for six brands that all supposedly wanted to sound “friendly and conversational.”

Same general stance, but very different experiences.

Here’s another thing we tend to do when an idea doesn’t feel original enough: we try to make it sound more important. Usually, the better move is the opposite. So, get specific.

If the topic is why marketers should understand their audience, tell me about the moment you realized the people clicking your emails weren’t the people you thought you were writing for. If the topic is trusting your instincts, tell me about the campaign where every dashboard told you one thing and three customer replies made you rethink the whole thing.

Those specifics are difficult for someone else—and especially AI—to replicate because they belong to you. Strangely enough, the more specific you get, the more likely someone else is to recognize themselves in the story.

That, to me, is what good thought leadership does. I don’t especially want to finish an article thinking, “Wow, that person is extremely impressive.” I’d much rather finish it thinking, “I’ve seen that, too,” or, even better, “I’ve never thought about it that way.”

This may be the part I care about most.

You don’t need to have founded a company, managed a billion-dollar brand, spoken at Inbound/Unbound, written a book, gone viral, or built a massive following. And you certainly don’t need an unusually glamorous career story. I say the more unglamorous, the better.

What you do need is to have paid attention.

Maybe you’ve written 2,000 emails. Maybe you inherited a content calendar that made absolutely no sense and somehow had to make it work. Maybe you watched a brilliant idea die a slow death through 14 rounds of feedback. Maybe you learned more about how customers actually talk by reading their replies than you ever learned from an ICP sales deck.

I’ve been a teacher, a poet, a CSR, and an inventory manager. I’ve written content for college textbook buyers, finance bros, utilities, and voters. I’ve learned a lot of weird things that sometimes bubble up in my content today—and plenty about what not to do.

Stop chasing experiences nobody else has ever had. Just notice what your experiences have taught you.

Maybe. But I’d challenge that thought before accepting it unequivocally.

Ask yourself why you care about the topic. Ask what you’ve seen that made you think about it differently. Ask what you know now that you wish someone had explained to you two years ago. Ask where your opinion differs, even slightly, from the standard advice.

Ask what lesson feels embarrassingly obvious only because you’ve learned it so many times. Then start there.

Your unique take may not be a revolutionary theory that changes email marketing forever. Frankly, that sounds exhausting, and I probably won’t read that.

It may simply be a familiar idea attached to a specific experience, filtered through a perspective that someone else couldn’t have arrived at in quite the same way. And that’s enough—that’s interesting.

But we aren’t actively seeking out more information. We are, however, seeking a unique perspective, and we want to lean in when you’ve noticed something.

So, let’s go with that.

If any of this sounds familiar, good, because that’s the whole point. You’ve already got the material. The next newsletter you’re stuck on doesn’t need a discovery. It needs you to say what you actually think.

Oh, and before you go!

If you want to keep this conversation going, come find me on LinkedIn. I’m there most days, saying some version of the same thing.

Until next time,

Jeremy 👋