“PRODUCTIZE YOURSELF: Productize has specific knowledge and leverage. Yourself has uniqueness and accountability. Yourself also has specific knowledge. So you can combine all of these pieces into these two words.”
This term Productize Yourself is popularized by the Angel Investor – Naval Ravikant. Naval is an investor, who invested early in companies like Uber or Notion. He is also an entrepreneur, co-founding AngelList.
As a product manager, I’ve always been fascinated by this concept and in recent times, I decided to take a deeper look at this notion of productizing yourself.
What does it Mean to Productize Yourself
Productizing yourself means that you must figure out what you’re uniquely good at and apply as much leverage as possible. It’s like taking the best of what you are and packaging it in a way that creates value for others. This concept is common in entrepreneurship, freelancing, consulting, and personal branding.
And you can apply this concept to yourself today.
Productize Yourself
Start with Leverage
Making impact and building influence requires leverage.
To Leverage is to use ‘something’ to its maximum advantage. In this context, that ‘something’ is yourself. How can you fully optimize your skills, knowledge, and experience?
And there are many ways to build leverage.
Leverage can be built through labor or capital. However, these kinds of leverage are gifts from other people. For labor, somebody must follow you. To obtain capital, someone must give you money, assets to oversee or equipment.
Yet, there is a new form of leverage.
Leverage with Code and Media to fully productize yourself
These include books, media, movies, and codes. With this new form of leverage, you can easily package your knowledge with the intention of making it simple to duplicate and distributing them to everybody without having to pay significant additional expenses. Naval called them ‘products of no marginal cost of replication’.
This is the perfect strategy for productizing yourself.
You can locate your audience by searching the internet and social media platforms. And you can use the internet to express yourself uniquely, grow a business, provide value, and make people happy. Any specialized interest can be pursued online, provided you’re the best at it.
All you need is your phone (or a computer) —you don’t need anyone’s permission.
If you can’t code, write books and blogs, record videos and podcasts – Naval Ravikant
Be Credible and Accountable
Intentions don’t matter. Actions do – Naval Ravikant
To get the best of your leverage, you must establish credibility and accountability.
Credibility is risky because you have to do everything in your own name. On the other end, accountability has two drawbacks. It enables you to accept responsibility for successes and bear the consequences when things go wrong.
But imagine this…
You’re waiting for the chance to shine when something new comes along that requires your set of skills. Meanwhile, you have built your brand on LinkedIn, on X and by constantly sharing your knowledge. You took some risks to establish your reputation. When it’s time to seize the opportunity, you can do so by applying as much leverage as you possibly can.
That’s what being accountable will help you.
You have to enjoy it and keep doing it, keep doing it, and keep doing it. Don’t keep track, and don’t keep count because if you do, you will run out of time. – Naval Ravikant
And here is the last step.
Be Authentic to truly Productize Yourself
No one can compete with you on being you. Most of life is a search for who and what needs you the most. – Naval Ravikant
There will always be competition out there.
Finding your unique skill set and being authentic are the keys to breaking free from the competition trap. No one will be able to compete with you because you love what you do, so you know how to do it better.
The good news is that, despite our individual differences, everyone excels at being themselves.
Remember this as well…
Make your most important decisions when you are determining what is right to do and who is best to collaborate with. The real secret to making major improvements in both your financial and personal relationships is staying committed and positive in the long term.
Become the best in the world at what you do. Keep redefining what you do until this is true. – Naval Ravikant
