Downloaded a few Chrome extensions for YouTube today where it shows how well the video has performed relative to all other content on the channel. And the pattern I noticed today was you gotta do it all to reduce the vagueness in your product and the product here being a video.

The common patterns I found that help :

• You will have a niche and mentioning the icons, desired states and popular things inside of that niche helps a lot.
• Negative language referring to the audience like you are XYZ, why you are not able to do ABC
• Talking about self from reference point of user. Example, I am a XYZ. If I was twenty, here’s what I would do

You can afford to keep things vague if your audience is really warm or has stakes. The most vague thing we participate in are exams, and of course we gotta just power through it. But same is not the condition when it comes to a YouTube video or a reel. There we expect extreme clarity so that our subconscious mind can just Take a monkey brain decision. That’s why talking about a random person instead of icon creates vagueness. That is why talking negatively about audience helps them recognize it really quick and reduces the vagueness. And if you are talking positively about them they will not actually believe you. And lastly, if you are going to talk about yourself, you are again creating weakness. Like why should I listen to this person? That’s why you have to talk from their frame of reference. Like if your audience is mostly twenty, then that’s why the example I give can work. Essentially anything that makes what you Are offering obvious is gonna help you attract more customers or audience. Same goes for product positioning.

It is reasonable to assume that if you are walking inside a niche, you understand the niche and you understand the people and their pain, and thus you have made something that will address all three of those. So what you have on hand is a good product. All what needs to be done is to position it in such a way in front of audience that there will be no vagueness or ambiguity that this product is relevant for them. Same goes for a video. Like if you make productivity videos, then I know you will understand the niche, the people in that niche, their pain, and how your video can help them. Your video is good. I assume that, but you have to position it in such a way on YouTube that the viewer also understands this. And that’s why you have to notice patterns on the platforms you are posting. You have to understand the psychology behind why something is working because the YouTube homepage is essentially a collection of outliers. So when you see a collection of outliers, you should try to visit the channel as well and see what’s happening with them. What made this video pop up? How how are other videos? Performing what is working, what is not working, what are the common threads among those?

If you are making videos or doing D2C sales, these are really low friction actions that it doesn’t cost much for the user to click. It doesn’t cost much for the user to buy your fucking protein powder or whatever. So there is a budget set for those things, right? You don’t want to think twenty second, twenty minutes before you click on a YouTube video, right? So, vague things are built in a way that they are going to get filtered out right away because they are asking for too much budget. That’s why being really simple, really precise, really non-ambiguous, non-vague is important.

This is also why comparing your product with competitors, other than that of price, can be really bad. Like we are we have ten x better quality than our competitor. So first of all, I have to understand what your competitors are performing and what ten x means. Is it really worth for so much wickedness? You you have just fucking nuked me with an epistemic missile. Why why do I have got to Think so much. Just tell me something that is relevant for me. Information that just makes me hit the buy button.

This is also why comparing your product with competitors, other than that of price, can be really bad. Like we are we have ten x better quality than our competitor. So first of all, I have to understand what your competitors are performing and what ten x means. Is it really worth for so much wickedness? You you have just fucking nuked me with an epistemic missile. Why why do I have got to think so much. Just tell me something that is relevant for me. Information that just makes me hit the buy button.

Basically, bad positioning is such that it makes your audience think and process information because it is vague and ambiguous. Bad positioning is a epistemic missile. If after looking at something the first thing it makes you do is think instead of click, it is bad.

Bad positioning creates a thinking problem for the audience. Good positioning creates a recognition event, where audience recognizes this is what they already wanted. It is recognition of themselves and their desires. It does not require thought.

Another qualifier is that most people are not interested in who did what type of stuff, even if it is done by Icon. People are mostly concerned with the. State of being and change that caused changes in that state of being. Okay. Nobody wants to know what Alexander tactically did or whatever. They want to know about. How genius Alexander was, or the fall of Alexander, and what caused it? We are really interested in snapshots of icons and events that change that snapshot and the newer snapshot that emerged as a result. So avoid tactics or actions. It is really about scenes. That okay? Scene one, scene two, and ninety five percent of the scene is just the personality, the status, the standing of the icons.

who and why over what and how, because who and why makes us anticipate really hard and seek a what and how. For example, a young ambitious prince with a hunger to dominate world is a interesting nugget that might make us wonder what happened next and how we did it and let’s us uncover Alexander.

And it is natural because people want to be someone. They don’t want to do something. Of course, there are desires to do something, but it is not as consequential as the dream of being something. So yeah, why would our brains want to hunt for stories of someone doing something when we can have the ones of someone being something?

Alexander is interesting as “the young man who seemed unconquerable,” then “the empire stretched beyond what one person could hold together,” then “the conqueror dies and the world he built fractures.”

Napoleon is “master of Europe,” then “Russia changes the trajectory,” then “exile.”

WeWork is “the founder treated like a visionary king,” then “the IPO process exposes the machinery,” then “collapse.”

Nokia is “the company that owned mobile phones,” then “the computing paradigm changes,” then “irrelevance.”

The colder the audience and the lower the stakes, the less vagueness your product can tolerate.

That is why exams can be insanely vague.

“Chapter 7 is coming.”

Fine. You have to study it anyway.

Your salary depends on your job? You will read the terrible 80-page PDF.

Your girlfriend sends you a six-minute voice note? You're listening.

But a random YouTube video?

The viewer owes you absolutely nothing.

So the thumbnail/title/package has to answer almost instantly:

Is this for me?
What world is this about?
What problem/desire do I recognize?
What am I going to get?
Why this person?

If any of those require deliberate thought, the competing video wins.

There is almost a temperature × vagueness relationship here:

High stakes / warm audience → ambiguity tolerated.

Low stakes / cold audience → ambiguity punished.

For example:
- “Michael Jordan signed a royalty agreement” is an action.
- “Michael Jordan went from an athlete paid to wear a product to someone who participated in its upside” is a transformation.
- The royalty agreement is the mechanism that explains the transformation.
Likewise:
- “J.P. Morgan gathered bankers in his library” is an action.
- “A private banker became the person America depended on when its financial system stopped functioning” is a change in being.
- The missing central bank, Morgan’s authority and his control over liquidity explain the change.
So the fuller structure is:
Who they were → what happened → what they became → what caused the transformation