When you work in a scalable digital medium, what you make is available to everyone around the world with a zero marginal cost of reproduction.

That means you don’t have to make more of your product to sell it to more people. The product costs nothing to duplicate — things like software products, YouTube videos, etc.

You spend the same amount of time and energy whether one person sees it or 10 million people see it.

But there is a downside to that: you’re competing with the rest of the world. And that means if you’re going to win, you have to be the best at what you do.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the YouTube channel Tara and I started. Our channel is competing against all the other female comedy creators around the world for a global audience.

And because that audience has access to everything, they only want the best. They want the funniest sketch. The funniest movie. The funniest video on the internet.

When the best is available at a reasonable price (or free), it’s a winner-take-all market.

This isn’t the case with, say, residential real estate. You’re NOT competing against the rest of the world, just the other real estate owners in the area. And a place to live is a “need to have” product. Everyone needs a place to live, so they’re willing to buy less than the best to get it.

People don’t need to watch our sketch videos. That’s why they need to be the best.

Now, the question becomes: can we be the best sketch makers in the world?

Naval Ravikant has a useful aphorism for this:

“Be the best in the world at what you do. Keep redefining what you do until this is true.”

This means you have to keep iterating within your niche until you ARE the best. That’s why copying other people’s ideas never really works in the long run.

No one wants the second best comedy sketch of the same idea. They want the original.

Nobody wants the second-funniest screenplay of the same premise. They want the funniest.

So, how do you become the best in your niche? You have to keep refining your voice until you stand alone.

And sometimes that means you end up in a different place than where you started. I’ve been thinking about this and our sketches. Do we want to be the best sketch-makers in the world?

I’m not sure. That’s a post for another day.

But whatever you do land on, you want to become the go-to person for that thing. That will attract opportunities and create luck.

Look at someone like comedy producer Judd Apatow. For decades, he was the go-to guy for raunchy, funny romantic comedies with heart. All his movies have the same ingredients. He’s owned that niche and he’s made movie after movie with Universal Studios for almost two decades.

You have to own your niche.

And to do that, you have to know yourself. Know what you like. And ignore the noise.

You have to know what you like if you’re going to create it. And that means shutting out the noise of the world and following your instincts in taste and sensibility.

Because the world is going to push you away from it. Once you get good at something, people will want you to do your thing for them. And that usually means in their taste and style.

You have to be sure that your voice is a good match for theirs, or the partnership will be nothing but pain.

This has happened in our writing many times. We get notes from directors and producers and readers all the time. And sometimes they have a different sensibility than ours.

When that happens, it’s very hard to take notes because those notes push the movie into something it’s not supposed to be. We can fix plot holes and dialogue tweaks and notes like ‘push the comedy further.’

But we can’t take a note that basically says: make a different version of this movie.

We can’t do that. Because even if we tried, it would be really bad because it’s not us.

So the first rule of creativity is to know thyself. Know what you like and stick to it.

Start now. And thanks for reading.

-Thomas