The people with the largest followings in your category mostly agree with each other. Look at the top twenty voices in almost any professional field and you will find a consensus position restated in twenty different fonts. That is not evidence they are right. It is evidence that agreement is the path of least resistance, and that most people optimizing for reach found the same shortcut.
Which creates the opening. When everyone in a category holds the same view, holding a different one is cheap distinctiveness, provided you can actually defend it. The hard part was never finding the gap. The hard part is being willing to stand in it after the first person calls you an idiot in your replies.
This is a working method to build a personal POV that holds up under pressure, along with the five tests I use to check whether a position is real or just contrarian noise.
A POV is not a topic, a niche, or a tone
Ask most professionals to describe their point of view and you get one of three non-answers.
The first is a topic. “My POV is about AI in healthcare.” That is a subject area. Ten thousand people share it. It tells no one what you think.
The second is a tone. “My POV is that I keep it real and cut through the noise.” That is a persona, and it is the most common one on professional social platforms, which should tell you how much signal it carries.
The third is a value statement. “I believe companies should treat their people well.” Nobody disagrees. A position that generates no opposition generates no memory either, because the brain does not store what it already assumed.
A point of view is a specific claim about how your field works that a competent, informed person in that field would dispute. That is the whole definition, and the operative word is dispute. If you cannot name a group of qualified people who think you are wrong, you have not built a point of view. You have summarized the consensus with better formatting.
Here is the first of the five tests. The Disagreement Test: state your position in one sentence to someone senior in your field and watch their face. If they nod, you failed. If they pause, or push back, or say “that depends,” you have something.
Find the thing you keep arguing about
You do not build a personal POV in a strategy session. You already have one, buried in the arguments you have been having for years without noticing that they add up to a position.
Three places to dig.
The first is the recurring client or colleague disagreement. Every practitioner has a fight they have had forty times. The thing you have to talk someone out of in almost every engagement. The advice you give that gets resistance every time and turns out right often enough that you keep giving it. That fight is a point of view in raw form, and the fact that you keep having it is proof there is a real gap between what you think and what the field assumes.
The second is the thing you have stopped saying out loud because it went badly. Most people with real expertise have a view they have suppressed for professional comfort. Perhaps you think a widely sold service category is mostly worthless. Perhaps you think a tool your industry loves is actively harmful. The suppression is the signal. A view you avoid stating in mixed company is a view with stakes.
The third is the pattern you have seen that has no name. Practitioners accumulate observations that the published literature has not caught up to. If you have noticed something across dozens of engagements that nobody has written down, naming it is one of the most defensible positions available to you, because you are the primary source.
Write down every candidate without filtering. Then apply the second test. The Specificity Test: can you state the position without using an abstract noun? “Companies should be more transparent” fails. “Agencies should publish their pricing on their website and lose the clients who were only there for the negotiation” passes. Abstraction is where a position goes to hide.
Run the Costly Claim Test
This is the third test and the one that separates real positions from performance. I call it the Costly Claim Test, and it asks a single question: what does holding this view cost you?
A position that costs nothing is decoration. If your stated view loses you no clients, no invitations, no partnerships, and no comfort, then it is not a position, because you would hold it either way and so would everyone else. Cost is what makes a claim informative to the people watching. It signals that you believe the thing enough to pay for it, and belief backed by payment is the only kind observers can distinguish from noise.
The costs come in recognizable shapes. You lose a client segment, because your view rules out the work they want to buy. You lose access, because the people who run the conferences or the industry association now find you inconvenient. You lose the easy sale, because your position requires you to tell prospects they do not need the expensive thing. You lose peer approval, which is the cost people underestimate most severely and feel most sharply.
Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson at 37signals have run this play for two decades. Their position, argued across books like Rework and It Doesn’t Have to Be Crazy at Work, holds that venture capital, hypergrowth, and the long-hours culture that comes with them are choices rather than requirements, and mostly bad ones. That view cost them the entire startup-industrial complex as an audience. It also made them the definitive reference for a large group of founders who wanted a different model and had nowhere to look. In 2021 they went further, announcing an internal policy restricting political discussion at the company, and roughly a third of their staff took buyouts and left. Agree with them or not, that is what a costly claim looks like when the bill comes.
Compare that to the average executive thought leadership post, which argues that culture matters and change is hard. Zero cost. Zero recall.
Apply the test honestly. If you cannot name a specific person or group who will be annoyed with you, keep digging.
Name the adversary, not the enemy
Every durable point of view is defined against something. The distinction that matters is whether you are opposing an idea or a person.
Opposing an idea gives you unlimited material and no lasting damage. “The quarterly content calendar is the wrong organizing unit for a modern content team” is an adversary. You can write against it for five years, name the specific failures it causes, describe what replaces it, and nobody has to be humiliated for you to be right.
Opposing a person gives you a burst of attention and a permanent liability. Attacking a named competitor or a named individual converts a professional disagreement into a personal feud, and feuds consume attention that would otherwise go toward your argument. It also caps your ceiling, because serious people avoid public brawls and the ones who do not tend to be exhausting.
Name the practice, the assumption, the incentive structure, or the vendor category. Then be specific about what it does to people. “Most agencies sell retainers because retainers are good for agency cash flow, and the deliverable count gets set by what fills the hours rather than by what the client needs” is a real adversary claim. It names a mechanism, it implicates an incentive, and it does not require you to accuse any particular firm of bad faith.
The advantage of an idea-adversary is that it generates a content universe. Once you have named the thing you are against, every piece you publish either documents its failures, explains its origins, describes the alternative, or answers an objection. That is a publishing plan that runs for years without repeating itself, which is precisely what a position built on a personality cannot do.
Where does the evidence come from?
A position without evidence is an opinion, and opinions are free. What converts a claim into a point of view people cite is the material underneath it.
Four sources of evidence, in ascending order of durability.
Reasoning is the weakest. You explain why your position follows from things everyone accepts. This works, it is cheap, and it is also available to anyone with the same reasoning ability, which means it does not hold exclusivity for long.
Pattern observation is stronger. You have seen this across a specific number of engagements, and you can describe what happened without breaching confidence. “In the last three years I have watched this fail the same way in every mid-market rollout I have been part of, and the failure mode is always the handoff between procurement and the operating team.” That is evidence a competitor cannot generate without doing the same work.
Original data is stronger still. A survey you ran, a benchmark from your own operations, an analysis of a public dataset nobody thought to analyze. This is expensive relative to the first two and it is the reason a small firm can outrank a large one on a topic. Data gets cited, and citations are what answer engines reach for when they assemble a response. If you want to see whether your positions are showing up in AI answers at all, a free AI Citation Checker run against your name and your top competitors will tell you fast.
Prediction is the most durable and the most dangerous. You state what will happen, on the record, with a date. When it comes true, that record is worth more than everything else combined. Marc Andreessen published “Why Software Is Eating the World” in the Wall Street Journal in August 2011, arguing that software companies would take over large swaths of the economy. The essay is still cited fifteen years later, not because the prose was beautiful, but because the prediction was specific, it was dated, and it was mostly right. Very few people are willing to take that exposure. That is why the payoff is so large.
Say the same thing until you are sick of it
Here is the fourth test, and it is the one most people fail through impatience. The Repetition Test: are you willing to make the same argument, in public, for two years?
Positions compound through repetition, and repetition feels bad from the inside. By the fifth time you publish a version of your core claim, you are bored with it. You assume your audience is bored too. This assumption is wrong, and it is wrong by a wide margin, because at any given moment the overwhelming majority of your potential audience has never encountered you at all.
The reason to build a personal POV at all is association: someone hears the topic and thinks of you. That association forms through exposure count, not through novelty. Every professional whose name you associate with an idea got there by saying it hundreds of times across different formats, different rooms, and different years.
What changes across repetitions is the evidence and the angle, not the claim. The claim is fixed. This week it is a case where the position was proven. Next month it is an objection you answer. Next quarter it is new data. The year after that it is a keynote. Same spine, different surfaces.
The teams that build this well treat the position as an asset with a maintenance schedule rather than a campaign with an end date. If you want the mechanical version of that discipline, it looks a lot like a content machine pointed at one argument instead of forty topics.
What happens when you are wrong?
This is the fifth test, and it is the one that keeps a strong position from curdling into dogma. The Falsifiability Test: what evidence would change your mind, and can you state it in advance?
A position you would hold regardless of evidence is not a point of view. It is an identity, and identity-based claims are brittle in a specific way: because they cannot be revised, they can only be abandoned, usually in embarrassing circumstances.
State the conditions up front. “I think this practice is wasteful, and if someone shows me a controlled comparison where it beats the alternative on retained revenue, I will change my position.” That single sentence does three things. It signals intellectual seriousness. It invites the exact evidence that would make you smarter. And it creates a graceful exit if the field moves, which fields do.
Then, when you are wrong, say so loudly. Publish the revision with the same energy you published the original. The people who follow you for the substance will respect it and the people who followed you for the certainty were never going to be useful anyway.
The POV has to survive contact with your business
If you build a personal POV that contradicts how you make money, it will eventually destroy you, and this is the failure mode nobody warns about.
If you argue in public that a service category is a waste of money and your firm sells that service, someone will notice, and the noticing will be public. If you argue for radical transparency and your pricing page says “contact us,” the gap between the position and the practice is the story. Every stated position creates an obligation, and the obligation is operational rather than rhetorical.
Run the alignment check before you commit. Take your position and ask what your company would have to change to be consistent with it. Sometimes the answer is nothing, and you are set. Sometimes the answer is a pricing model, a service line, a hiring practice, or a client you should not have taken. Those are real costs, and the Costly Claim Test predicted them, which is the point.
The upside is that a position your business genuinely embodies becomes almost impossible to copy. A competitor can restate your argument in a LinkedIn post. They cannot restructure their business to make it true, at least not quickly, and prospects can tell the difference between someone who holds a view and someone who is renting one for the quarter.
So the five tests, together: would a qualified peer dispute it, can you state it without abstraction, what does holding it cost you, will you repeat it for two years, and what would prove you wrong. A claim that passes all five is worth building a decade of work on.
Which brings the question back to you. What do you believe about your field that you have been careful not to say out loud, and what exactly are you afraid it would cost?