Quick Loot: What the Category Kings of snow and sound have in common

How to turn your bold idea into a market-leading movement.

Arrrrr! 🏴‍☠️ Welcome to a 🔒 subscriber-only edition 🔒 of Category Pirates. Each week, we share radically different ideas to help you design new and different categories. For more: View the mini-book archive | Listen to a category design jam session | Dive into an audiobook | Enroll in the free Category Accelerator email course

---

Dear Friend, Subscriber, and Category Pirate,

The world’s most successful categories are created by radical thinkers who refuse to settle for the ordinary.

These people are Pattern Breakers.

They don’t just tweak the existing — they completely reimagine it. They ask “what if” questions that most never even think of. And in doing so, they reshape industries and create entirely new categories.

Take Shane McConkey, for example.

The pioneer of free skiing didn’t just want to compete in traditional skiing. He wanted to create an entirely new sport. One day, he looked at water skis and thought, “Snow is just frozen water.” So, he took a pair of water skis, jerry-rigged them, and took them skiing in Alaska.

And he created free skiing, an entirely new category in extreme sports.

Or consider Jim Marshall and his iconic Marshall amplifiers.

Pete Townshend, lead guitarist of legendary rock band The Who, knew they had a problem. Their drummer, Keith Moon, played with such explosive power that the band's regular amplifiers couldn't keep up. In 1965, Townshend walked into Jim Marshall's London music shop with an unusual request: build him a louder, larger amp cabinet. An initially skeptical Marshall took on the challenge — creating an amplifier that didn't just solve The Who's volume problem, it revolutionized rock and transformed how bands sound on stage.

Shane and Jim are both Pattern Breakers.

They did the “impossible” by breaking the patterns that everyone else follows.

But to think like a Pattern Breaker, you must first live in the future — not in the present moment. You must envision a reality that doesn't exist yet. And you must take bold actions to bring the future you see to life.

So, how do you think like a Pattern Breaker?

Here are the five frameworks that help Pattern Breakers turn their ideas into reality: