The best way to develop a “spiky" point of view? Be spherical, not spiky
Interrogating the "sea of sameness", standing out, and spikiness as a yardstick of self-authorship
If you’re in a particular bubble of the internet, you, like me, have tried to articulate, defend and finesse a “spiky” point of view. (Hey friends! 👋🏽)
You’ve probably asked friends if you’re being “spiky enough”, and you might even have wondered how on earth anyone can really know the answer to that question.
Wait, what’s a “spiky point of view” and why’s it all the rage?
Wes Kao, the co-founder of Maven and altMBA, marketing guru, and all-round cool cat coined the term. She thinks of it as “... a perspective others can disagree with. It’s a belief you feel strongly about and are willing to advocate for. It’s your thesis about topics in your realm of expertise.” This general willingness to take a stand helps you stand out, and not be “lost in the sea of sameness”.
A spiky point of view is not any random hot take or contrarian opinion. To Wes, your spiky point of view shows that you observe and think rigorously about the world around you. It should be debatable, held in conviction, capable of teaching something new, based in evidence, and not be controversial for the sake of it.
The idea reminds me of something Charlie Munger, the legendary American investor and partner of Warren Buffet, supposedly said: “I never allow myself to have an opinion on anything that I don’t know the other side’s argument better than they do.” Yet, your spiky point of view is by no means the absolute truth. “The beauty”, as Wes says, is that your spiky point of view can “start to a conversation”. Especially if you’re not into chit-chat.
One reason I love the notion of a ‘spiky point of view’ is that it’s meant to be a deeply personal and authentic expression of belief.
Most of us are unlikely to have opinions with sparkling levels of novelty. At least, nothing of the order of Galileo disagreeing with the crowd with his spiky heliocentric theory. As Audrey Lorde says,
“…there are no new ideas. There are only new ways of making them felt — of examining what those ideas feel like being lived on Sunday morning at 7 A.M., after brunch, during wild love, making war, giving birth, mourning our dead — while we suffer the old longings, battle the old warnings and fears of being silent and impotent and alone, while we taste new possibilities and strengths.”
New ways of making an idea felt emerge from our unique lens on the world - our unique “experience, skills, personality, instincts, and intuition”, as Wes says. That lens helps us find our spiky points of view.
On this metric, it would be just as hard for me to champion Naval Ravikant’s spiky point of view as it would be, Big Bird’s.
Because my spiky point of view can only be mine, Wes calls it a unique and “powerful” competitive advantage. And here’s where I run into many questions.
Are we really in a competition? Who am I competing with? For what? And why?! In this essay, I try to piece together some reflections on these questions. On the whole, I find that I’m not so enthused about unearthing my spiky points of view, only to wear them like some kind of badge so that I stand out in the noise.
Are we really in a competition… or, how can we aim to stand out if we don’t know what we are standing outside of?
A spiky point is view is supposed to be a perspective that others can disagree with. But we can never really know what others think when people are in groups.
Each of us contains multitudes, as Walt Whitman has been helpfully reminding us since 1855. We have complex and rich inner lives. And we don’t get to express our whole selves with nuance, always.
In my time as a lawyer, I’ve seen that the consensus in the room takes the level of the loudest or the most senior voices. Irving Janis identified this phenomenon as groupthink. Even in not-so-hot decision-making settings, as in group-coaching sessions, we are shy to express our full selves in the group. It’s not a wonder, considering we are wired to seek belonging, especially as traditional spaces to which we belong fail us.
Besides, our methods to gauge what others think are notoriously bad. At best, they comprise scrolling through our Twitter feeds, between interactions in our work and social echo chambers.
There as well, we only know what people do and what they say - never what they think. My grandmum, mum and I chose to marry. The Hindu marriage is a conservative social institution and it is solemnised through an archaic Hindu wedding ritual. But dig a little deeper and we all come from vastly different, even divergent belief systems about why we chose to do so. There is no “sea of sameness” even when we do and say the same things.
When we can’t know what others truly think, we default to assuming a point of view on their part. Isn’t it rather self-serving if my spiky point of view were based on what I think others think?
Unearthing a spiky point of view from within oneself, with integrity, is no mean feat. It takes reading, conversations, awareness of one’s own biases, understanding the various variables at play and how they interact, and so on. Even then, we cannot be sure we are disagreeing with the crowd.
The pressure to articulate a spiky point of view elides the work it takes to make and hold an opinion. Instead, it makes us overly concerned with being spiky.
You might argue that there is still value to being spiky.
My friend Cam Houser points out that our multitudes are hardly for the crowds. (There’s a reason Dunbar’s Number caps our capacity to build meaningful relationships that see us for our multitudes!) The nature of the beast - in the crowded economy and the more crowded internet - is that we must stand out. So we need to articulate spiky pints of view, so that “the spike digs in and gives something to work with, debate, agree or disagree with…”
Cam’s point fits with Wes’ conception of the spiky point of view, especially when you see the idea in its context. The “spiky point of view” is a popular notion in marketing and branding circles. Industry leaders like Mark Schaefer are taken in by the marketability of a bold and non-conformist spiky point of view. (Wes isn’t the marketing whiz of our times for nothing).
You might even relate to this as a creator looking to build an audience, as my friend Silvio Castelletti says. Your ideas get thrown into the marketplace whether or not you intend for them to. Inevitably, they have to compete for attention.
Which makes me wonder…
Who am I competing with and for what… or, are we overstating the ‘crowd’ and the need to stand out?
I’m sitting here in my corner of the internet, writing about the world-building adventures I’ve embarked on by working on my mind-body health. My context is niche. I’m an urban, millennial, caste-privileged Indian lawyer who identifies as a woman. My lens is that living an embodied life is a more fulfilling “ambition” than anything I’ve tried on traditional scripts. I can’t fathom a competition in this journey of one, where my views can only be mine given my unique life, experiences and story.
The assumption seems to be that the competition is the infinite content machine of the internet; the only way to win is a spiky point of view.
This defensive individualism, of stating our spiky points of view to stand out in the noise, makes sense only if we’re in a crowd of millions. But how many of us really operate at that scale when we write online?
Sitting here in South India, whenever I ask myself what ‘the crowd’ thinks about something I want to write about, I hit a roadblock. I can’t seem to identify ‘the crowd’. My extended family that lives mostly offline? My colleagues from the coaching world who are likely barely on Substack? My writing friends? My peers from my profession?
It appears we all operate in bubbles, even when we seem to be amid the internet’s millions. Those bubbles probably are probably only an order of magnitude larger than Dunbar’s Number.
Even if we did operate at a scale of millions, I can’t be something to everyone unless I’m willing to risk being nothing to anyone. It’s a fool’s errand. We are simply too diverse as individuals in our preferences and contexts. This is probably why the best advice will have us act like we function in a bubble anyway.
Remember John Steinbeck’s timeless advice? Write for an audience of one.
David Perell echoes Steinbeck at the Write of Passage. The aim, David says, is to write earnestly, for a “targeted group of people who trust you, admire how you think, and want to help you achieve your goals”. Li Jin, the co-founder of multiple funds that invests in creators, argues that a “100 true fans” would even be economically sustainable for creators.
The advice isn’t that we start writing to the millions and then build an audience of a targeted group. It is that we start by writing for a targeted group - or even just a single person - and then earn their trust to the point of arriving for the millions.
So it might be time to revisit the competition-for-attention hypothesis.
With the internet’s teeming millions, the project may have been to compete for attention. But in our bubbles, the project is to build trust.
Diffuse Attention is nothing without the trust of its small band of friends, feedback-givers, cheerleaders and mentors. This fundamental interdependence makes me want to serve the reader with something thoughtful and rigorous. To me, the only way to do that is by seeing us for our multitudes.
You might argue that spiky points of view are valuably anyway, whether or not we believe in the competition for attention. They show a kind of self-authorship - the willingness to make one’s own judgments, and create one’s own thoughts and ideas.
Which makes me wonder…
Why must we aim to stand out… or, is standing out really the indicator of self-authorship we think it is?
The spikiness of a point of view on the internet is an overrated barometer of self-authorship. If you are a human being in a free country with no barriers to accessing the internet or expressing yourself, chances are you’re well on your way to countless spiky points of view.
But self-authorship is so much more.
It is taking on socialised beliefs inherited from our social and professional communities and cultures. It’s daring to differ even when it comes at immense personal cost. It’s losing your shot at becoming partner in Big Law because you stood against the senior partner who was sexually-harassing someone. It’s Prince Harry walking out of the Royal Family because royal protocols with the British tabloid press became enablers of racism against Meghan Markle. It’s the difficult call to start therapy to learn to make amends when we mess up irredeemably with our partners, parents or children.
It takes blood, sweat and tears to stand for what we believe, among people we need, love, or seek belonging with. At the very least, it takes gumption. Because real lives and relationships are at stake offline.
Putting our spiky points of view on the internet is the low-hanging fruit in the mighty tree of self-authorship. An alternate barometer of self-authorship is whether we can hold our unique spiky points of view alongside multiple others’.
Can we see a single issue from multiple frames at the same time? Hold contrary ideas together in our awareness at once? See the truth in multiple, seemingly contradictory perspectives, simultaneously?
What would it take to be our individual selves while acknowledging and taking along others, around us? To see the multitudes in ourselves and in others, together? Roger Martin says it takes integrating different even opposing ideas and mental models and embracing the ensuing tension. Wendy Smith and Marianne Lewis call for cultivating a paradox mindset, the belief that seemingly opposed things can be true at the same time because they are interdependent. Robert Kegan calls it the final stage of adult evolution - developing the self-transforming mind.
My time in coaching as well as litigating disputes in the Indian courts has me attracted to the possibilities that lie in the integration of binaries.
I’d like to see more of us embracing multiple spiky, straight, even square points of view together.
I’d like to see us cultivate the chops to articulate a spherical Space of Views.
How’s that for a spiky point of view?
Thank you for reading my effort at surveying the “Space of Views” around our infatuation with the “spiky point of view”. Feedback is the greatest love language. The warmest gratitude to Cam Houser,
, , and - also some of my favourite online writers - for reading and engaging with an earlier draft of this piece.
This was such a well articulated and wonderful piece Malavika. I feel like this is one I'll want to read more than once. Thank you for sharing.
So much value to consider here Malavika. Such a pleasure to read something that obviously comes from great thoughtfulness. This gives me so much food for thought I'm going to put in queue to develop as a separate piece. I'll definitely point readers back here as a high-quality reference.